i 
ae 
- 
‘3 





THE LIBRARY OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF 


THE LIBRARY OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF 
NORTH CAROLINA 





ENDOWED BY THE 
DIALECTIC AND PHILANTHROPIC 
SOCIETIES 


PR5259 
~AL 


Cy oe y, 
OT 
10003062882 


age Con 
Ce Rea. 98 - 


QC 


mote Salty 





This book is due at the LOUIS R. WILSON LIBRARY on the 
last date stamped under “Date Due.” If not on hold it may be 
renewed by bringing it to the library. | 


DATE 
_DUE 


eee 


RET. 






NaS 


pete We 20774 : 





APR 4.1100 
aT hi uo i 
z 
MAY 
MAY 6 
A 
AAU 4 


[™ 
Be = 
—_ 
« if 








Ns eae ec: 
Side QUEEN en od 
@) . OF THE AIR 


BEING A STUDY OF THE GREEK MYTHS 
OF CLOUD AND STORM 


BY 


JOHN RUSKIN, LL. D. 


SIEGEL-COOPER CO. 
NEW YORK CHICAGO 





TABLE OF CONTENTS. ° 


EREFACK ccs ccareaee eeeeeeaesereee2 2 OSH SBSH2H8 PERO ° I 


I. ATHENA CHALINITIS. 
(Athena in the Heavens.) 

Lecture on the Greek myths of Storm, 
given (partly) in University College, Lon- 
Gonentarch 0, 1000, 2... ss seeceus ose 

a ATHENA KERAMITIS. 
(Athena in the Larth.) 

Study, supplementary to the preceding lect 
ure, of the supposed and actual relations 
of Athena to the vital force in material 
GOATS I Metres ein te tee sicteiarel ele se 37 

Il ATHENA ERGANE. 
(Athena in the Heart.) 


Various notes relating to the Conception of 
Athena as the Directress of the Imagina- 


tion and Wil! eorecece Coe eer eee er eHerere 148 
} P> }? 
cae i eae DB E373 7} Cf # 
é é C) JC a) os f 
co) 7 
Ay 
f 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 


https://archive.org/details/queenofairbeingsO2rusk 


PREFACE. 


_—— 


My days and strength have lately been 
much broken; and I never more felt the 
insufficiency of both than in preparing for 
the press the following desultory memoran- 
da on a most noble subject. But I leave 
them now as they stand, forno time nor 
labor would be cnough to complete them to 
my contentment; and I believe that they 
contain suggestions which may be followed 
with safety, by persons who are beginning 
to take interest in the aspects of mythology, 
which only recent investigation has removed 
from the region of conjecture into that of 
rational inquiry. I have some advantage, 
also, from my field work, in the interpre- 
tation of myths relating to natural phenom- 
ena; and I have had always near me, since 
‘we were at college together, a sure, and un- 
weariedly kind, guide, in my friend Charles 
Newton, to whom we owe the finding of 


2 Preface. 


more treasure in mines of marble than, were 
it rightly estimated, all California could buy. 
I must not, however, permit the chance of 
his name being inany wise associated with 
my errors. Much of my work has been 
done obstinately in my own way ; and he 
is never responsible for me, though he~has 
often kept me right, or at least enabled me 
to advance in aright direction. Absolutely 
right no one can be in such matters; nor 
does a day pass without convincing every 
honest student of antiquity of some partial 
error, and showing him better how to think, 
and where to look. ButI knew that there 
was no hope of my being able to enter with 
advantage on the fields of history opened by 
the splendid investigation of recent philo- 
logists, though I could qualify myself, by 
attention and sympathy, to understand, here 
and there, a verse of Homer’s or Hesiod’s, 
as thesimple people did for whom they sang. 

Even while I correct these sheets for press, 
a lecture by Professor Tyndall has been put 
into my hands, which I ought to have heard 
last 16th of January, but was hindered by 
mischance; and which, I now find, com- 
pletes, in two important particulars, the 


Preface. 3 


evidence of an instinctive truth in ancient 
symbolism ; showing, first, that the Greek 
_-conception of an ztherial element pervading 
space is justified by the closest reasoning of 
modern physicists; and, secondly, that the 
blue of thesky, hitherto thought to be caused 
by watery vapor, is, indeed, reflected from 
the divided air itself; so that the bright 
blue of the eyes of Athena, and the deep 
blue of her egis, prove to be accurate myth- 
ic expressions of natural phenomena which 
it is an uttermost triumph of recent science 
to have revealed. 

Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine 
triumph more complete. To form, ‘‘ within 
an experimental tube, a bit of more perfect 
sky than the sky itself!” here is magic of 
the finest sort ! singularly reversed from that 
of old time, which only asserted its com- 
petency to enclose in bottles elemental 
forces that were—not of the sky. 

Let me, in thanking Professor Tyndall for 
the true wonder of this piece of work, ask 
his pardon, and that of all masters in phys- 
ical science, for any words of mine, either in 
the following pages or elsewhere, that may 
ever seem to fail in the respect due to their 


4 Preface. 


great powers of thought, or in the admira 
tion due to the far scope of their discovery. 
But I will be judged by themselves, if I have 
not bitter reason to ask them to teach us 
more than yet they have taught. 

This first day of May, 1869, I am writing 
where my work was begun thirty-five years 
ago, within sight of the snows of the higher 
Alps. In that half of the permitted life of 
man, I have seen strange evil brought upon 
every scene that I best loved, or tried to 
make beloved by others. The light which 
once flushed those pale summits with its 
rose at dawn, and purple at sunset, is now 
umbered and faint; the air which once in- 
jaid the clefts of all their golden crags with 
azure is now defiled with languid coils of 
smoke, belched from worse than volcanic 
fires ; their very glacier waves are ebbing, 
and their snows fading, asif Hell had 
breathed on them; the waters that once 
sank at their feet into crystalline rest are 
now dimmed and foul, from deep to deep, 
and shore to shore. These are no careless 
words—they are accurately, horribly, true. 
I know what the Swiss lakes were; no pool 
of Alpine fountain at its source was clearer, 


Preface, 5 


This morning, on the Lake of Geneva, at 
half a mile from the beach, I could scarcely 
see my oar-blade a fathom deep. 

The light, the air, the waters, all defiled ! 
How of the earth itself? Take this one fact 
for type of honor done by the modern Swiss 
to the earth of hisnative land. There used 
to be a little rock at the end of the avenue 
by the port of Neuchatel; there, the last 
marble of the foot of Jura, sloping to the blue 
water, and (at this time of year) covered 
with bright pink tufts of Saponaria. I 
went, three days since, to gather a blossom 
at the place. The goodly native rock and its 
flowers were covered with the dust and ref- 
use of the town; but, in the middle of the 
avenue, was a newly-constructed artificial 
rockery, witha fountain twisted through a 
spinning spout, and an inscription on one 
of its loose-tumbled stones, — 

“ Aux Botanistes, 
Le club Jurassique,” 
Ah, masters of modern science, give me 
back my Athena out of your vials, and seal, 
if it may be, once more, Asmodeus therein. 
You have divided the elements, and united 
them; enslayed them upon the earth, and 


6 Preface. 


discerned them in the stars. Teach us, now, 
but this of them, which is all that man need 
know,—that the Air is given to him for his 
life; and the Rain to his thirst, and for his 
baptism ; andthe Fire for warmth ; and the 
Sun for sight; and the Earth for his meat— 
and his Rest. 


VEVAY, May 1, 1869, 


THE QUEEN OF THE Aik. 


ed 


1 
Papen A CHALINITIS.* 


(Athena in the Heavens.) 


LECTURE ON THE GREEK MYTHS OF STORM, GIVEN 
(PARTLY) IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON, 
MARCH 9, 1869. 


1. I witt not ask your pardon for endeav- 
oring to interest you in the subject of Greek 
Mythology ; but I must ask your permission 
to approach it in a temper differing from 
that in which it is frequently treated. We 
cannot justly interpret the religion of any 
people, unless we are prepared to admit that 
we ourselves, as well as they, are liable to 


*“ Athena the Restrainer.” The name is given to 
her as having helped Bellerophon to bridle Pegasus, the 


flying cloud. 
7, 


3 Tde Queen of the Air. 


error in matters of faith; and that the con~ 
victions of others, however singular, may in 
some points have been well founded, while 
our own, however reasonable, may in some 
particulars be mistaken. You must forgive 
me, therefore, for not always distinctively 
calling the creeds of the past ‘‘superstition, ” 
and the creeds of the present day ‘‘religion ;” 
as well as for assuming that a faith now 
confessed may sometimes be _ superficial, 
and that a faith long forgotten may once 
have -been sincere. tas thes task yotmthe 
Divine to condemn the errors of antiquity, 
and of the philologists to account for them ; 
I will only pray you to read, with patience, 
and human sympathy, the thoughts of men 
who lived without blame in a darkness they 
could not dispel; and to remember that, 
whatever charge of folly may justly attach 
to the saying, ‘‘There is no God,” the folly 
is prouder, deeper, and less pardonable, in 
saying, ‘‘ There is no God but for me.” 

2. A myth, in its simplest definition, is a 
story with a meaning attached to it other than 
it seems to have at first ; and the fact that 
it has such a meaning is generally marked 
by some of its circumstances being extra- 


Tbe Queen of the Air. 9 


ordinary, or, in the common use of the word, 
unnatural, Thus if I tell you that Hercules 
killed a water-serpent in the lake of Lerna, 
and if I mean, and you understand, nothing 
more than that fact, the story, whether true 
or false, is not a myth. But if by telling 
you this, I mean that Hercules purified the 
stagnation of many streams from deadly 
miasmata, my story, however simple, is a 
true myth; only, as, if I left it in that sim- 
plicity, you would probably look for nothing 
beyond, it will be wise in me to surprise 
your attention by adding some singular cir- 
cumstance ; for instance, that the water- 
snake had several heads, which revived as 
fast as they were killed, and which poisoned 
even the foot that trod upon them as they 
slept. And in proportion to the fulness of 
intended meaning I shall probably multiply 
and refine upon these improbabilities ; as, 
suppose, if, instead of desiring only to tell 
you that Hercules purified a marsh, I wished 
you to understand that he contended with 
the venom and vapor of envy and evil 
ambition, whether in other men’s souls or 
in his own, and choked ¢ha/ malaria only by 
supreme toil,—I might tell you that this 


10 The Queen of the Afr. 


serpent was formed by the goddess whose 
pride was in the trial of Hercules ; and that 
its place of abode was by a palm-tree; and 
that for every head of it that was cut off, 
two rose up with renewed life; and that 
the hero found at last he could not kill the 
creature at all by cutting its heads off or 
crushing them, but only by burning them 
down; and that the midmost of them could 
not be killed even that way, but had to be 
buried alive. Only in proportion as I mean 
more, Ishall certainly appear more absurd 
in my statement; and at last when I get 
unendurably significant, all practical per- 
sons will agree that I was talking mere non- 
sense from the beginning, and never meant 
anything at all. 

3. It is just possible, however, also, that 
the story-teller may all along have meant 
nothing but what he said; and that, incred- 
ible as the events may appear, he himself 
literally believed—and expected you also to 
believe—all this about Hercules, without any 
latent moral or history whatever. And it is 
very necessary, in reading traditions of this 
kind, to determine, first of all, whether you 
are listening to a simple person, who is 


The Queen of the Air. Ir 


relating what, at all events, he believes to 
be true (and may, therefore, possibly have 
been so tosome extent), or to a reserved phi- 
losopher, who is veiling a theory of the 
universe under the grotesque of a fairy tale. 
It is, in general, more likely that the first 
supposition should be the right one: simple 
and credulous persons are, perhaps fortu- 
nately, more common than philosophers ; 
and it is of the highest importance that you 
should take their innocent testimony as 
it was meant, and not efface, under the 
graceful explanation which your cultivated 
ingenuity may suggest, either the evidence 
their story may contain (such as it is worth) 
of an extraordinary event having really taken 
place, or the unquestionable light which it 
will cast upon the character of the person 
by whom it was frankly believed. And to 
deal with Greek religion honestly, you must 
at once understand that this literal belicf 
was, in the mind of the general people, as 
deeply rooted as ours in the legends of our 
own sacred book; and that a basis of 
unmiraculous event was as little suspected, 
and an explanatory symbolism as rarely 
traced, by them, as by us. 


12 The Queen of the Air. 


You must, therefore, observe that I deeply 
degrade the position which sucha myth as 
that just referred to occupied in the Greek 
mind, by comparing it (for fear of offending 
you) to our story of St. George and the 
Dragon. Still, the analogy is perfect in 
minor respects; and though it fails to give 
you any notion of the vitally religious 
earnestness of the Greek faith, it will exactly 
illustrate the manner in which faith laid hold 
of its objects. 

4. This story of Hercules and the Hydra, 
then, was to the general Greek mind, in its 
best days, a tale about a real hero and a 
real monster. Not one ina thousand knew 
anything ofthe way in which the story had: 
arisen, any more thanthe English peasant 
renerally is aware of the plebeian original 
of St. George ; or supposes that there were 
once alive in the world, with sharp teeth 
and claws, real, and very ugly, flying drag- 
ons. On the other hand, few persons traced - 
any moral or symbolical meaning in the 
story, and the average Greek was as far 
from imagining any interpretation like that I 
have just given you, as an average English- 
man is from seeing in St. George the Red 


The Queen of the Air. 13 


Cross Knight of Spenser, or in the Dragon 
the Spirit of Infidelity. But, for all that, 
there was a certain undercurrent of con- 
sciousness in all minds that the figures meant 
more than they at first showed ; and, accord- 
ing to each man’s own faculties of senti- 
ment, he judged and read them ; just asa 
Knight of the Garter reads more in the jewel 
on his collar than the George and Dragon 
of a public-house expresses to the host or to 
his customers. Thus, to the mean person 
the myth always meant little ; to the noble 
person, much ; and the greater their famil- 
arity with it, the more contemptible it be- 
came to one, and the more sacred to the 
other ; until vulgar commentators explained 
it entirely away, while Virgil made it the 
crowning glory of his choral hymn to Her- 
cules. 


“ Around thee, powerless to infect thy soul, 
Rose, in his crested crowd, the Lerna worm.” 


“ Non te rationis egentem 
Lernzus turba capitum circumstetit anguis.” 


And although, in any special toil of the 
hero’s life, the moral interpretation was rarely 
with definiteness attached to its event, yet 


14 The Queen of the Air. 


in the whole course of the life, not only a 
symbolical meaning, but the warrant for 
the existence of a real spiritual power, was 
apprehended of all men. Hercules was no 
dead hero, to be-remembered only aga 
victor over monsters of the past—harmless 
now as slain. He was the perpetual type 
and mirror of heroism, and its present and 
living aid against every ravenous form of 
human trial and pain. 

5. But, if we seek to know more than this 
and to ascertain the manner in which the 
story first crystallized into its shape, we 
shall find ourselves led back generally to 
one or other of two sources—either to actual 
historical events, represented by the fancy 
under figures personifying them; or else to 
natural phenomena similarly endowed with 
life by the imaginative power usually more 
or less underithe sinfluence Ofsterroreus ie 
historical myths we must leave the masters 
of history to follow; they, and the events ~ 
they record, being yet involved in great, 
though attractive and penetrable, mystery. 
But the stars, and hills, and storms are with 
us now, as they were with others of old; 
and it only needs that we look at them with 


The Queen of the Air. Is 


the earnestness of those childish eyes to 
understand the first words spoken of them 
by the children of men, and then, in all the 
most beautiful and enduring myths, we 
shall find, not only a literal story ofa real 
person, not only a parallel imagery of moral 
principle, but an underlying worship of nat- 
ural phenomena, out of which both have 
sprung, and in which both forever remain 
rooted. Thus, from the real sun, rising and 
setting,—from the real atmosphere, calm in 
its dominion of unfading blue, and fierce in 
its descent of tempest,—the Greek forms 
first the idea of two entirely personal and 
corporeal gods, whose limbs are clothed in 
divine flesh, and whose brows are crowned 
with divine beauty; yet so real that the 
quiver rattles at their shoulder, and the 
chariot bends beneath their weight. And, on 
the other hand, collaterally with these cor- 
poreal images, and never for one instant 
separated from them, he conceives also two 
omnipresent spiritual influences, of which 
one illuminates, as the sun, with a constant 
fire, whatever in humanity is skilful and 
wise ; and the other, like the living air, 
breathes the calm of heavenly fortitude, and 


16 The Queen of the Air. 


strength of righteous anger, into every 
human breast that is pure and brave. 

6. Now, therefore, in nearly every myth 
of importance, and certainly in every one 
of those of which I shall speak to-night, you 
have to discern these three structural parts, 
—the root and the two branches: the root, 
in physical existence, sun, orsky, or cloud, 
or sea; then the personal incarnation of 
that, becoming a trusted and companionable 
deity, with whom you may walk hand in 
hand, as achild with its brother or its sister ; 
and, lastly, the moral significance of the 
image, which is in all the great myths eter- 
nally and beneficently true. 

7. The great myths; that is tosay, myths 
made by great people. Tor the first plain 
fact about myth-making is one which has 
been most strangely lost sight of, —that you 
cannot make a myth unless you have some- 
thing to make it of Youcannot tell asecret 
which you don’tknow. Ifthe myth is about 
the sky, it must have been made by some- 
body who had looked atthesky. Ifthe myth 
is about justice and fortitude, it must have 
been made by some one who knew what it 
was to be just or patient. According to the 


The Queen of the Air. 17 


quantity of understanding in the person will 
be the quantity of significance in his fable; 
and the myth of a simple and ignorant race 
must necessarily mean little, because a sim- 
ple and ignorant race have little to mean. 
So the great question in reading a story is al- 
ways, not what wild hunter dreamed, or 
what childish race first dreaded it ; but what 
wise man first perfectly told, and what 
strong people first perfectly lived by it. 
And the real meaning of any myth is that 
which it has at the noblest age of the nation 
among whom itiscurrent. ‘The farther back 
you pierce, the less significance you will - 
find, until you come to the first narrow 
thought, which, indeed, contains the germ 
ofthe accomplished tradition; but only as 
the seed contains the flower. As the intelli- 
gence and passion of the race develop, they 
cling to and nourish their beloved and sacred 
legend; leaf by leaf it expands under the 
touch of more pure affections, and more 
delicate imagination, until at last the perfect 
fable burgeons out into symmetry of milky 
stem and honied bell. 

8. But through whatever changes it may 
pass, remember that our right reading of itis 


18 The Queen of the Air. 


wholly dependent on the materials we have 
in our own minds for an intelligent answer- - 
ing sympathy. If it first arose among a 
people who dwelt under stainless skies, 
and measured their journeys by ascending 
and declining stars, we certainly cannot 
read their story, if we have never seen any- 
thing above us in the day but smoke, nor 
anything around us in the night but candles. 
If the tale goes on to change clouds or planets 
into living creatures,—to invest them with 
fair forms and inflame them with mighty 
passions, —we can only understand the story 
of the human-hearted things, in so far as we 
ourselves take pleasure in the perfectness of 
visible form, or cansympathize, by an effort 
of imagination, with the strange people who 
had other loves than that of wealth, and 
other interests than those of commerce. 
And, lastly, if the myth complete itself to 
the fulfilled thoughts of the nation, by at- 
tributing to the gods, whom they have carved 
out of their fantasy, continual presence with 
their own souls; and their every effort for 
good is finally guided by the sense of the 
companionship, the praise, and the pure will 
of immortals, we snail be able to follow 


The Queen of the Afr. 19 


them into this last circle of their faith only 
in the degree in which the better parts of 
our own beings have been also stirred by 
the aspects of nature, or strengthened by her 
laws. It may be easy to prove that the as- 
cent of Apollo in his chariot signifies ~oth- 
ing butthe risingofthesun. But what does 
the sunrise itself signify to us? If only lan- 
guid return to frivolous amusement, or fruit- 
less labor, it will, indeed, not be easy for 
us to conceive the power, over a Greek, of 
tnesname vor Apollo. But if, for us also, 
as for the Greek, the sunrise means daily 
restoration to the sense of passionate glad- 
ness and of perfect life—if it means the thrill- 
ing of new strength through every nerve,— 
the shedding over us of a better peace than 
the peace of night, in the power of the 
dawn,—and the purging of evil vision and 
fear by the baptism of its dew ;—if the sun 
itself is an influence, to us also, of spiritual 
good—and becomes thus in reality, not in 
imagination, to us also, a spiritual power,— 
we may then soon over-pass the narrow 
limit of conception which kept that power 
impersonal, and rise with the Greek to the 
thought of an angel who rejoiced as a strong 


20 The Queen of the Air. 


man to run his course, whose voice calling 
to life and to laborrang round theearth, and 
whose going forth was to the ends of heaven. 

g. The time, then, at which I shall take 
up for you, as well as I can decipher it, the 
traditions of the gods of Greece, shall be 
near the beginning of its central and formed 
faith,—about 500 B.c.,—a faith of which the 
character is perfectly represented by Pindar 
and Aschylus, who are both of them out- 
spokenly religious, and entirely sincere 
men; while we may always look back to 
find the less developed thought of the pre- 
ceding epoch given by Homer, in a more 
occult, subtle, half-instinctive, and involun- 
tary way. 

10. Now, at that culminating period of 
the Greek religion, we find, under one gov- 
erning Lord ofall things, four subordinate 
elemental forces, and four spiritual powers 
living in themandcommanding them. The 
elements are of course the well-known four 
of the ancient world,—the earth, the waters, 
the fire, and the air; and the living powers 
of them are Demeter, the Latin Ceres ; Posei- 
don, the Latin Neptune; Apollo, who has re- 
tained always his Greek name ; and Athena, 


The Queen of the Air. 2I 


the Latin Minerva. Each of these are de- 
scended from, or changed from, more an- 
cient, and therefore more mystic, deities of 
the earthand heaven, and of a finer element 
of zther supposed to be beyond the 
heavens ;* but at this time we find the four 
quite definite, both in their kingdoms and in 
their personalities. ‘They are the rulers of 
the earth that we tread upon, and the air that 
we breathe ; and are with us as closely, in 
their vivid humanity, as the dust that they . 
animate, and the winds that they bridle. 
I shall briefly define for you the range of 
their separate dominions, and then follow, 
as far as we have time, the most interest- 
ing of the legends which relate to the queen 
of the air. 

11, The rule of the first spirit, Demeter, 
the earth mother, is over the earth, first, as 
the origin of all life,—the dust from whence 
we were taken ; secondly, as the receiver of 
all things back at last into silence—‘‘ Dust 
thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” 
And, therefore, as the most tender image of 
this appearing and fading life, in the birth 

* And by modernscience now also asserted, and with 
probability argued, to exist, 


22 The Queen of tbe Air. 


and fall of flowers, her daughter Proserpine 
plays in the fields of Sicily, and thence is 
torn away into darkness, and becomes the 
Queen of Fate—not merely of death, but of 
the gloom which closes over and ends, not 
beauty only, but sin, and chiefly of sins the 
sin against the life she gave; so that sheis, in 
her highest power, Persephone, the avenger 
and purifier of blood—‘‘ The voice of thy 
brother’s blood cries to me ou/of she ground.” 
Then, side by side with this queen of the 
earth, we find a demigod of agriculture by 
the plough—the lord of grain, or of the thing 
ground by the mill, And it is a singular 
proof of the simplicity of Greek character at 
this noble time, that of all representations 
left to us of their deities by their art, few 
are so frequent, and none perhaps so beauti- 
ful, as the symbol of this spirit of agricult- 
ure. 

12, Then the dominant spirit of the ele- 
ment water is Neptune, but subordinate to 
him are myriads of other water spirits, of 
whom Nereus is the chief, with Palemon, 
and Leucothea, the ‘‘ white lady ” of the sea; 
and Thetis, and nymphs innumerable who, 
like her, could “suffer a sea change,” while 


The Queen of the Air. 23 


the river deities had each independent power, 
according to the preciousness of their streams 
to the cities fed by them,—the ‘fountain 
Arethuse, and thou, honored flood, smooth 
sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds.” 
And, spiritually, this king of the waters is 
lord of the strength and daily flow of human 
life—he gives it material force and victory ; 
which is the meaning of the dedication of 
the hair, as the sign of the strength of life, 
to the river or the native land. 

13. Demeter, then, over the earth, and 
its giving and receiving cf life. Neptune 
over the waters, and the flow and force of 
life,—always among the Greeks typified by 
the horse, which was to them as a crested 
Sea-wave, animated and bridled. Then the 
third element, fire, has set over it two 
powers: over earthly fire, the assistant of 
human labor, is set Hephestus, lord of all 
labor in which is the flush and the sweat of 
the brow ; and over heavenly fire, the source 
of day, isset Apollo, the spirit of all kindling, 
purifying, and illuminating intellectual wis- 
dom, each of these gods having also their 
subordinate or associated powers, —servant, 
ar sister, or Companion muse. 


24 The Queen of the Air. 


14. Then, lastly, we come to the myth 
which is to be our subject of closer inquiry, — 
the story of Athena and of the deities subor- 
dinate to her. This great goddess, the Neith 
of the Egyptians, the Athena or Athenaia 
of the Greeks, and, with broken power, half 
usurped by Mars, the Mincrva of the Latins, 
is, physically, the queen of the air; having 
supreme power both over its blessing of 
calm, and wrath of storm ; and, spiritually, 
she is the quecn of the breath of man, first 
of the bodily breathing which is life to his 
blood, and strength to his arm in battle; 
and then of the mental breathing, or inspira- 
tion, which is his moral health and habitual 
wisdom ; wisdom of conduct and of the 
heart, as opposed to the wisdom of imagina- 
tion and the brain ; moral, as distinct from 
intellectual; inspired, as distinct from illu- 
minated. 

15. Byasingular and fortunate, though 
I believe wholly accidental, coincidence, 
the heart-virtue, of which she is the spirit, 
was separated by the ancients into four divis- 
ions, which have since obtained acceptance 
from all men as rightly discerned, and have 
received, as if from the quarters of the four 


Tbe Queen of the Air. 25 


winds of which Athena is the natural queen, 
the name of ‘‘Cardinal” virtues: namely, 
Prudence (the right seeing, and foreseeing, 
of events through darkness) ; Justice (the 
righteous bestowal of favor and of indigna- 
tion); Fortitude (patience under trial by pain); 
and Temperance (patience under trial by 
pleasure). Withrespect to these four virtues, 
the attributes of Athena are all distinct. In 
her prudence, or sight in darkness, she is 
‘‘Glaukopis,” ‘‘owl-eyed.”* Inher justice, 
which is the dominant virtue, she wears two 
robes, one of light and one of darkness ; the 
robe ofilight, saffron color, or the color of 
the daybreak, falls to her feet, covering her 
wholly with favor and love,—the calm of 
the sky in blessing ; it is embroidered along 
its edge with her victory over the giants (the 
troublous powers of the earth), and the like- 
ness of it was woven yearly by the Athenian 
maidens and carried to the temple of their 
own Athena, not to the Parthenon, that was 
the temple of all the world’s Athena,—but 
this they carried to the temple of their own 
only one who loved them, and stayed with 


* There are many other meanings in the epithet; see, 
farther on, § 91, pp. 133) 134. 


He The Queen of the Air. 


them always. Then herrobe of indignation 
is worn on her breast and left arm only, 
fringed with fatal serpents, and fastened 
with Gorgonian cold, turning men to stone; 
physically, the lightning and the hail of 
chastisement by storm. Then in her forti- 
tude she wears the crested and unstooping 
helmet ;* and lastly, in her temperance, she 
is the queen of maidenhood—stainless as 
the air of heaven. 

16, But all these virtues mass themselves 
in the Greek mind into the two main ones, 
—of Justice, or noble passion, and Fortitude, 
or noble patience; and of these, the chief 
powers of Athena, the Greeks had divinely 
written for them, and for all men after them, 
two mighty songs,—one, of the Menis,f 
Mens, passion, or zeal, of Athena, breathed 
into a mortal whose name is “ Ache of heart,” 
and whose short life is only the incarnate 


* I am compelled, for clearness’ sake, to mark only 
one meaning at a time. Athena’s helment is some- 
times a mask, sometimes a sign of anger, sometimes of 
the highest light of ether ; but I cannot speak of all 
this at once. 

+ This first word of the Iliad, Menis, afterwards passes 
into the Latin Mens; is the root of the Latin name for 
Athena, “ Minerva,” and so of the English “ mind.” 


The Queen of the Air. 27 


brooding and burst of storm; and the other 
is of the foresizht and fortitude of Athena, 
maintained by her in the heart of a mortal 
whose name is given to him from a longer 
grief, Odysseus, the ful of sorrow, the much 
enduring, and the long-suffcring. 

17. The minor expressions by the Greeks 
in word, in symbol, andin religious service, 
of this faith, are so many and so beautiful, 
that I hopesome day to gather at least a few 
of them into a separate body of evidence 
respecting the power of Athena, and its rela-~ 
tions to the ethical conception of the Ho- 
meric poems, or, rather, to their ethical 
nature ; for they are not conceived didacti- 
cally, but are didactic in their essence, as all 
good art is. There is an increasing insensi- 
bility to this character, and even an open 
denial of it, among us now which is one of 
the most curious errors of modernism,—the 
peculiar and judicial blindness of an age 
which, having long practised art and poetry 
for the sake of pleasure only, has become 
incapable of reading their language when 
they were both didactic; and also, having 
been itself accustomed to a professedly 
didactic teaching, which yet, for private 


28 Tbe Queen of the Hir. 


interests, studiously avoids collision with 
every prevalent vice ofits day (and especially 
with avarice), has become equally dead to 
the intensely ethical conceptions ofa race 
which habitually divided all men into two 
broad classes of worthy or worthless, —good, 
and good for nothing. And even the cele- 
brated passage of Horace about the Iliad is 
now misread or disbelieved, as if it was im- 
possible that the Iliad could be instructive 
because it is not like a sermon. Horace 
does not say that itis like a sermon, and 
would have been still less likely to say so if 
he ever had had the advantage of hearing a 
sermon. ‘‘I have been reading that story 
of Troy again” (thus he writes to a noble 
youth of Rome whom he cared for), ‘‘ quietly 
at Preeneste, while you have been busy at 
Rome; and truly I think that what is base 
and what is noble, and what useful and use- 
less, may be better learned from that, than 
from all Chrysippus’ and Crantor’s talk put 
together.”* Which is profoundly true, not 


* Note, once for all, that unless when there is ques- 
tion about some particular expression, I never translate 
literally, but give the real force of what is said, as I 
best can, freely, 


The Queen of the Air. 29 


of the Iliad only, but of all other great art 
‘whatsoever ; for all pieces of such art are 
‘lidactic in the purest way, indirectly and 
omccultly, so that, first, you shall only be bet- 
Nered by them if you are already hard at work 
in bettering yourself; and when you are 
bettered by them, it shall be partly witha 
general acceptance of their influence, so con- 
stant and subtile that you shall be no more 
tonscious of it than of the healthy digestion 
nf food ; and partly by a gift of unexpected 
truth, which you shall only find by slow 
mining for it,—which is withheld on pur- 
pose, and close-locked, that you may not 
get it till you have forged the key ofitina 
a. furnace of your own heating. And this 
withholding of thcir meaning is continual, 
and confessed, in the great poets. Thus 
Piidar-says’ of himself: ‘*There is many 
an arrow in my quiver, full of speech to the 
wise, but, forthe many, they need inter- 
preters.” And neither Pindar, nor A'schy- 
lus, nor Hesiod, nor Homer, nor any of the 
preater poets or teachers of any nation or 
time, ever spoke but with intentional reser- 
vation ; nay, beyond this, there is often a 
meaning which they themselves cannot in- 


30 The Queen of the Air. 


terpert, —which it may be for ages long aftet 
them to intrepert,—in what they said, so far 
as it recorded true imaginative vision. For 
all the greatest myths have been seen by 
the men who tell them, involuntarily and 
passively,—seen by them with as great dis- 
tinctness (and in some respects, though not 
in all, under conditions as far beyond the 
control of their will) as a dream sent to any 
of us by night when we dream clearest ; and 
it is this veracity of vision that could not be 
refused, and of moral that could not be fore- 
seen, which in modern historical inquiry has 
been left wholly out of account; being in- 
deed the thing which no merely historical 
investigator can understand, or even believe; 
for it belongs exclusively to the creative or 
artistic group of men, and can only be inter- 
preted by those of their race, who them- 
selves In some measure also see visions and 
dream dreams. 

So that you may obtain amore truthful idea 
of the nature of Greek religion and legend 
from the poems of Keats, and the nearly as 
beautiful, and, in general grasp of subject, 
far more powerful, recent work of Morris, 
than from frigid scholarship, however exten- 


The Queen of the Air. 31 


sive. Not that the poet’s impressions or 
renderings of things are wholly true, but 
their truth is vital, not formal. They are 
like sketches from the life by Reynolds or 
Gainsborough, which may be demonstrably 
inaccurate or imaginary in many traits, and 
indistinct in others, yet will bein the deepest 
sense like, and true; while the work of 
historical analysis is too often weak with 
loss, through the very labor of its miniature 
touches, or useless in clumsy and vapid 
veracity of externals, and complacent secu- 
rity of having done all that is required for the 
portrait, when it has measured the breadth 
of the forehead and the length of the nose. 
18. The first of requirements, then, for the 
tight reading of myths, is the understanding 
of thenature of all true vision by noble per- 
sons; namely, that it is founded on con- 
stant laws common to all human nature; 
that it perceives, however darkly, things 
which are forallages true ; that we can only 
understand it so far as we have some per- 
ception of the same truth ; and that its ful- 
ness is developed and manifested more and 
more by the reverberation of it from minds 
of the same mirror-temper, in succeeding 


32 The Queen of the Hit. 


ages. You will understand Homer better 
by seeing his reflection in Dante, as you 
may trace new forms and softer colors in a- 
hillside, redoubled by a lake. 

I shall be able partly to show you, even 
to-night, how much, in the Homeric vision 
of Athena, has been made clearer by the 
advance of time, being thus essentially and 
eternally true ; but I must in the outset indi- 
cate the relation to that central thought of 
the imagery of the inferior deities of storm. 

19. And first I will take the myth of Molus 
(the ‘‘sage Hippotades” of Milton), as it is 
delivered pure by Homer from the early 
times. 

Why do you suppose Milton calls him 
‘‘save” ? One does not usually think of 
the winds as very thoughtful or deliberate 
powers. But hearHomer: ‘‘Then wecame 
to the /EKolian island, and there dwelt Kolus - 
Hippotades, dear to the deathless gods; 
there he dwelt ina floating island, and round - 
it was a wall of brass that could not be 
broken ; and the smooth rock of it ran up 
sheer. To whom twelve children were born 
in the sacred chambers, —six daughters and 
six strong sons ; and they dwell forever with 


The Queen of the Ait. 33 


their beloved father and their mother, strict 
in duty; and with them are laid up a 
thousand benefits; and the misty house 
around them rings with fluting all the day 
long.” Now, you are to note first, in this 
description, the wall of brass and the 
sheer rock. You will find, throughout the 
fables of the tempest-group, that the breten 
wall and precipice (occurring in another 
myth as the brazen tower of Danaé) are al- 
ways connected with the idea of the towe-- 
ing cloud lighted by the sun, here truly de- 
scribed as a floating island. Secondly, you 
hear that all treasures were laid up in them; 
therefore, you know this /Zolus is lord ofthe 
beneficent winds (‘‘he bringeth the wind 
out of his treasuries”) ; and presently after- 
wards Homer calls him the ‘“‘steward” of 
the winds, the master of the store-house of 
them. And this idea of gifts and precious- 
ness in the winds of heaven is carried outin 
the well-known sequel of the fable: olus 
gives them to Ulysses, all but one, bound in 
leathern bags, with a glittering cord of sil- 
ver; and so like bags of treasure that the 
sailors think they are so, and open them to 
see. And when Ulysses is thus driven back 
3 


34 The Queen cf the Hic. 


to /olus, and prays him again to help him, 
note the deliberate words of the king’s re- 
fusal,—‘‘ Did I not,” he says, ‘‘sendthee on 
thy way heartily, that thou mightest reach 
thy country, thy home, and whatever is 
dear tothee? It is not lawful for me again 
to send forth favorably on his journey a man 
hated by the happy gods.” This idea ofthe 
beneficence of AZolus remains to the latest 
times, though Virgil, by adopting the vul- 
gar change of the cloud island into Lipari, 
has lost it a little ; but even when it is final- 
ly explained away by Diodorus, /Kolus is 
still a kind-hearted monarch, who lived on 
the coast of Sorrento, invented the use of 
sails, and established a system of storm 
signals. 

20. Another benedicent storm-power, Bo- 
reas, occupies an important place in early 
legend, and a singularly principal one in 
art; and I wish I could read to you a pas- 
sage of Plato about the legend of Boreas and 
Oreithyia,* and the breeze and shade of the 
llissus—notwithstanding its severe reflection 


* Translated by Max Miiller in the opening of his 
essay on “Comparative Mythology.”—Chips from @ 
German Workshop, Vole iis 


The Queen of tbe Bir, 35 


upon persons who waste their time on myth- 
ological studies ; but I must go on at once 
to the fable with which youare all generally 
familiar, that of the Harpies. 

This is always connected with that of 
Boreas or the north wind, because the two 
sons of Boreas are enemies of the Harpies, 
and drive them away into frantic flight. 
The myth in its first literal form means only 
the batile between the fair north wind and 
the foul south one: the two Ilarpies, 
‘<«Stormswift ” and ‘‘Swiftfoot,” arethe sis- 
ters of the rainbow ; that is to say, they are 
the broken drifts of the showery south wind, 
and.the clear north wind drives them back ; 
but they quickly take a deeper and more 
malignant significance. You know the short, 
violent, spiral gusts that lift the dust before 
coming rain: the Harpies get identified first 
with these, and then with more violent 
whirlwinds, andso they are called ‘‘ Har- 
pies,” ‘‘the Snatchers,” and are thought of 
as entirely destructive; their manner of 
destroying being twofold,—by snatching 
away, and by defiling and polluting. This 
is a month in which you may really see a 
mall Harpy at her work almost whenever 


36 The Queen of the Air. 


you choose. The first time that there is 
threatening of rain after two or three days 
of fine weather, leave your window well 
open to the street, and some books or papers 
on the table; and if you do not, in a little 
while, know what the Harpies mean, and 
how they snatch, and how they defile, I'll 
give up my Greek myths. 

21. That is the physical meaning. It is 
now easy tofindthe mentalone. Youmust 
all have felt the expression of ignoble anges 
in those fitful gusts of sudden storm. There 
is a sense of provocation and apparent bit- 
terness of purpose in their thin and senseless 
fury, wholly different from the nobler anges 
of the greater tempests. Also, they seem 
useless and unnatural, and the Creek thinks 
of them always as vile in malice, and op, 
posed, therefore, to the Sons of Boreas, who 
are kindly winds, that fill sails, and wave 
harvests, —full of bracing health and happy 
impulses. From this lower and merely 
malicious temper, the Harpies rise into a 
greater terror, always associated with their 
whirling motion, which is indeed indicative 
of the most destructive winds ; and they are 
thus related to the nobler tempests, ag 


The Queen of the Hit. 24 


Charvbdis to the sea; they are devouring 
and desolating, merciless, making all things 
disappear that come in their grasp ; and so, 
spiritually, they are the gusts of vexatious, 
fretful, lawless passion, vain and overshad- 
owing, discontented and lamenting, meagre 
and insane,—spirits of wasted energy, and 
wandering disease, and unappeased famine, 
and unsatisfied hope. So you have, on the 
one side, the winds of prosperity and health, 
on the other,of ruin and sickness. Under- 
stand that, once, deeply,—any who have 
ever known the weariness of vain desires, the 
pitiful, unconquerable, coiling and recoiling 
and self-involved returns of some sickening 
famine and thirst of heart,—and you will 
know what was in the sound of the Harpy 
Celzeno’s shriek from her rock ; and why, in 
the seventh circle of the ‘‘Inferno,’” the 
Harpies make their nests in the warped 
branches of the trees that are the souls of 
suicides. 

22. Now you must always be prepared to 
read Greek legends as you trace threads 
through figures on a silken damask: the 
same thread runs through the web, but it 
makes part of different figures, Joined with 


38 Use Queen of the Air. 


other colors you hardly recognize it, and in 
different lights it is dark or light. Thus the 
Greek fables blend and cross curiously in 
different directions, till they Init themselves 
into an arabesque where sometimes you 
cannot tell black from purple, nor blue from 
emerald—they being all the truer for this, 
because the truths of emotion they represent 
are interwoven in the same way, but all the 
more difficult to read, and to explain in any 
order. Thus the Harpies, as they represent 
vain desire, are connected with the Sirens, 
who are the spirits of constant desire; so 
that it is difficult sometimes in early art to 
know which are meant, both being repre- 
sented alike as birds with women’s heads ; 
only the Sirens are the great constant desires 
—the infinite sicknesscs cf heart—which, 
rightly placed, give lifc, and wrongly placed, 
waste it away ; so that there are two groups 
of Sirens, one noble and saving, as the other 
is fatal. But there are no animating or saving 
Harpies ; their nature is always vexing and 
full of weariness, and thus they are curiously 
connected with the whole group of legends 
about Tantalus. 

33. We all know what it is to be tanta- 


The Queen of the Rir. 39 


lized ; but we do not often think of asking 
what Tantalus was tantalized for—what he 
had done, to be forever kept hungry in sight 
Oreiood.) Well; he “had not been con- 
demned to this merely for being a glutton. 
By Dante the same punishment is assigned 
to simple gluttony, to purge itaway ; but the 
sins of Tantalus were of a much wider and 
more mysterious kind. ‘There are four great 
sins attributed to him : one, stealing the food 
of the gods to give 1t tomen ; another, sacri- 
ficing his son to feed the gods themselves (it 
may remind you fora moment of what I was 
telling you of the earthly character of Deme- 
ter, that, while the other gods all refuse, she, 
dreaming about her lost daughter, eats part 
mf the shoulder of Pelops before she knows 
what she is doing); another sin is, telling 
the secrets of the gods; and only the fourth 
-—stealing the golden dog of Pandareos—is 
connected with gluttony. The special sense 
of this myth is marked by Pandareos receiv- 
ing the happy privilege of never being 
troubled with indigestion ; the dog, in gen- 
eral, however, mythically represents all 
utterly senseless and carnal desires ; mainly 
that of gluttony; and inthe mythic seuse 


40 The Queen of the Hit. 


of Hades—that is to say, so far as it repre: 
sents spiritual ruin in this life, and nota 
literal hell—the dog Cerberus as its gate- 
keeper-—-with this special marking of hig 
character of sensual passion, that he fawns 
on all those who descend, but rages against 
all who would return (the Virgilian ‘‘ facilis 
descensus ” being a later recognition of this 
mythic character of Hades) ; the last labor 
of Hercules is the dragging him up to the 
light ; and in some sort he represents the 
voracity or devouring of Hades itself ; and 
the medizval representation of the mouth of 
hell perpetuates the same thought. Then, 
also, the power of evil passion is partly 
associated with the red and scorching light 
of Sirius, as opposed to the pure light of the 
sun: he is the dog-star of ruin; and hence 
the continual Homeric dwelling upon him, 
and comparison of the flame of anger to his 
swarthy light; only, in his scorching, it is 
thirst, not hunger, over which he rules 
physically ; so that the fable of Icarius, his 
first master, corresponds, among the Greeks, 
to the legend of the drunkenness of Noah. 
The story of Acteeon, the raging death of 
Hecuba, and the tradition of the white dog 


The Queen of the Afr. aa 


which ate part of Hercules’ first sacrifice, 
7nd so gave name to the Cynosarges, are all 
various phases of the some thought,—the 
tsreek notion of the dog being throughout 
‘:onfused between its serviceable fidelity, its 
svatchfulness, its foul voracity, shameless- 
ness, and deadly madness, while with the 
furious reversal or recoil of the meaning 
which attaches itself to nearly every great 
rnayth,—and which we shall presently see 
\1otably exemplified in the relations of the 
#erpent to Athena,—the dog becomes in 
whilosophy a type of severity and absti- 
Petice: 

24. It would carry us too far aside were £ 
fo tell you the story of Pandareos’ dog—or 
tather of Jupiter's dog, for Pandareos was 
its guardian only ; all that bears on our 
present purpose is that the guardian of this 
golden dog had three daughters, one of 
whom was subject to the power of the Sirens, 
and is turned into the nightingale ; and the 
other two were subject to the power of the 
Harpies, and this was what happened to 
them: They were very beautiful, and they 
were beloved by the gods in their youth, 
aud all the great goddesses were anxious to 


42 Cie Queen of the Air. 


bring them up rightly. Of all types of 
young’ ladies’ education, there is nothing so 
splendid as that of the younger daughters 
of Pandareos. They have literally the four 
greatest goddesses for their governesses. 
Athena teaches them domestic accomplsh- 
ments, how to weave, and sew, and the 
like; Artemis teaches them to hold them- 
selves up straight; Hera, how to behave 
proudly and oppressively to company ; and 
Aphrodite, delightful governess, feeds them 
with cakesand honey alldaylong. ll goes 
well, until just the time when they are going 
to be brought out; then there is a great dis. 
pute whom they are to marry, and in the 
midst of it they are carried off by the Har- 
pies, given by them to beslaves to the Furies, 
and never seen more. But of course there 
is nothing in Greck myths; and one never 
heard of such things as vain desires, and 
empty hopes, and clouded passions, defiling 
and snatching away the souls of maidens, 
in a London season. 

I have no time to trace for you any more 
harpy legends, though they are full of the 
most curious interest; but I may confirm 
for you my interpretation of this one, and 


The Queen of the Hir. 43 


prove its importance in the Greek mind, by 
noting that Polygnotus painted these maid- 
ens, in his great religious series of paintings 
at Delphi, crowned with flowers, and play- 
ing at dice; and that Penelope remembers 
them in her last fit of despair, just before 
the return of Ulysses, and prays bitterly 
that she may be snatched away at once into 
nothingness by the Harpies, like Pandareos’ 
daughters, rather than be tormented longer 
by her deferred hope, and anguish of disap- 
pointed love. 

25. I have hitherto spoken only of deities 
of the winds. We pass now toa far more 
important group, the deities ofcloud. Both 
of these are subordinate to the ruling power 
of the air, as the demigods of the fountains 
and minor seas are to the great deep; but, 
as the cloud-firmament detaches itself more 
from the air, and has a wider range of minis- 
try than the minor streams and seas, the 
highest cloud deity, Hermes, has a rank 
more equal with Athena than Nereus or 
Proteus with Neptune; and there is greater 
difficulty in tracing his character, because 
his physicaldominion over the clouds can, 
oi course, be asserted only where clouds are; 


44 The Queen of the Hit, 


and, therefore, scarcely at all in Egypt ;* so 
that the changes which Hermes undergoes 
in becoming a Greek from an Egyptian and 
Phoenician god, are greater than in any other 
case of adopted tradition. In Egypt Hermes 
is a deity of historical record, and a conduc- 
tor of the dead to judgment; the Greeks 
take away much of this historical function, 

assigning it to the Muses; but, in investing 
him with the physical power over clouds, 
they give him that which the Muses disdain, 
—the power of concealment and of theft. 
The snatching away by the Harpies is with 
brute force; but the snatching away by the 
clouds is connected with the thought of hid- 
ing, and of making things seem to be what 
they are not; so that Hermes is the god of 
lying, as he is of mist; and yet with this 


* I believe that the conclusions of recent scholarship 
are generally opposed to the Herodotean ideas of any 
direct acceptance by the Greeks of Egyptian myths: 
and very certainly, Greek art is developed by giving the 
veracity and simplicity of real life to Eastern savage 
grotesque; and not by softening the severity of pure 
Egyptian design. But it is of no consequence whether 
one conception was, or was not, in this case, derived 
from the other; my object is only to mark the essen- 
tial differences between them. 


The Queen of the Air. as 


ignoble function of making things vanish 
and disappear is connected the remnant of 
his grand I'gyptian authority of leading 
away souls in the cloud of death (the actual 
dimness of sight caused by mortal wounds 
physically suggesting the darkness and de- 
scent cf clouds, and continually being so 
described in the Iliad) ; while the sense of 
the need of guidance on the untrodden road 
follows necessarily. You cannot but re- 
member how this thought of cloud guidance, 
and cloud receiving of souls at death, has 
been elsewhere ratified. 

26. Without following that higher clue, I 
will pass to the lovely group of myths con- 
nected with the birth of Hermes on the 
(sreek mountains. You know thatthe valley 
of Sparta is one of the noblest mountain 
ravines in the world, and that the western 
flank of it is formed by an unbroken chain 
of crags, forty miles long, rising, opposite 
“parta, to a height of 8,000 feet, and known 
as the chain of Taygetus. Now, thenymph 
from whom that mountain ridge is named 
was the mother of Lacedzmon ; therefore 
the mythic ancestress of the Spartan race. 
She is the nymph Taygeta, and one of the 


46 The Queen of the Air. 


seven stars of spring ; one of those Pleiades 
of whom is the question to Job,—-‘‘Canst 
thou. bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, 
or loose the bands of Orion?” ‘‘The sweet 
influences of Pleiades,” of the stars of spring, 
—nowhere sweeter than among the pine- 
-clad slopes ofthe hills of Sparta and Arcadia, 
when the snows of their higher summits, 
‘beneath the sunshine of April, fell into fount- 
ains, and rose into clouds; and in every 
Tavine was a newly awakened voice of 
waters, —soft increase of whisper among its 
sacred stones ; and on every crag its form- 
ing and fading veil of radiant cloud; temple 
above temple, of the divine marble that no 
tool can pollute, norruin undermine. And, 
therefore, beyond this central valley, this 
great Greek vase of Arcadia, on the ‘‘hol- 
fow”’ mountain, Cyllene, or ‘‘ pregnant” 
mountain, called also ‘‘ cold,” because there 
the vapors rest,* and born of the eldest of 
those stars of spring, that Maia, from whom 
your own month of May has itsname, bring- 


* On the altar of Hermes on its summit, as on that 
of the Lacinian Hera, no wind ever stirred the ashes. 
By those altars, the Gods of Heaven were appeased, 
and all their storms at rest, 


The Queen of the Air. 47 


ing to you, in the green of her garlands, and 
the white of her hawthorn, the unrecognized 
symbols of the pastures and the wreathed 
snows of Arcadia, where long ago she was 
queen of stars: there, first cradled and 
wrapt in swaddling-clothes ; then raised, in 
a moment of surprise, into his wandering 
power,—is born theshepherd of the clouds, 
winged-footed and deceiving,—blinding the 
eyes of Argus,—escaping from the grasp of 
“Apollo—restless messenger between the 
hichest sky and topmost earth—‘‘ the herald 
Mercury, new lighted on a heaven-kissing 
<p ny a } 

27. Now, it will be wholly impossible, at 
present, to trace for you any of the minor 
Greek expressions of this thought, except 
only that Mercury, as the cloud shepherd, is 
especially called -Eriophoros, the wool- 
bearer. You will recollect thename from 
‘the common woolly rush ‘‘ eriophorum” 
which has a cloud of silky seed; and note 
also that he wears distinctively the flap cap, 
petasos, named from a word meaning ‘‘to 
-expand;” which shaded from the sun, and 
is worn on journeys. You have the epithet 
of mountains ‘‘cloud-capped” as an estab- 


48 The Queen of the Air. 


lished form with every poet, and the Mont 
Piate of Lucerne is named from a Latin 
word signifying specially a woollen cap ; but 
Mercury has, besides, a general Homeric 
epithet, curiously and intensely concentrated 
in meaning, ‘‘the profitable or serviceable 
by wool,”* that is to say, by shepherd 
wealth ; hence, ‘‘pecuniarily,” rich or serv- 
iceable, and so he passes at last into a 
general mercantile deity ; while yet the cloud 
sense of the wool is retained by Homer al- 
ways, so thathe gives him this epithet when 
it would otherwise have been quite meaning- 
less (in Iliad, xxiv. 440), when he drives 
Priam’s chariot, and breathes force into his 
horses, precisely as we shall find Athena 
drive Diomed ; and yet the serviceable and 
profitable sense—and something also of gen- 
tle and soothing character in the mere wool- 
softness, as used for dress, and religious rites 
—is retained also in the epithet, and thus the 


* I am convinced that the épe in épiovmos is not in- 
tensitive, but retained from épiov; but even if Iam 
wrong in thinking this, the mistake is of no conse- 
quence with respect to the general force of the term as 
meaning the frofitablness of Hermes. Athena’s epir 
thet of dyeAcia has a parallel significance. 


The Queen of the Air. 49 


gentle and serviceable Hermes is opposed to 
the deceitful one. 

28. In connection with this driving of 
Priam’s chariot, remember that as Autolycus 
is the son of Hermes the Deceiver, Myrtilus 
(the Auriga of the Stars) is the son of Her- 
mes the Guide. The name Hermes itself 
means impulse; and he is especially the 
shepherd of the flocks of the sky, in driving, 
or guiding, or stealing them; and yet his 
great name, Argeiphontes, not only—as in 
different passages of the olden poets—means 
“‘Shining White,” which is said of him as 
being himself the silver cloud lighted by the 
sun; but ‘‘ Argus-Killer,” the killer of bright- 
ness, which is said of him as he veils the 
sky, and especially the stars, which are 
the eyes of Argus; or, literally, eyes of 
brightness, which Juno, who is, with Jupi- 
ter, part of the type of highest heaven, 
keeps in her peacock’s train. We know 
that this interpretation is right, from a 
passage in which Euripides describes the 
shield of Hippomedon, which bore for its 
sign, ‘‘Argus the all-seeing, covered with 
eyes ; open towards the rising of the stars, 
and closed towards their setting.” 

4 


50 The Queen of the Air. 


And thus Hermes becomes the spirit of 
the movement of the sky or firmament ; not 
merely the fast flying of the transitory cloud, 
but the great motion of the heavens and stars 
themselves. Thus, in his highest power, 
he corresponds to the ‘‘primo mobile” of 
the later Italian philosophy, and, in his 
simplest, is the guide of all mysterious and 
cloudy movement, and of all successful 
subtleties. Perhaps the prettiest minor rec- 
ognition of his character is when, on the 
night foray of Ulysses and Diomed, Ulysses 
wears the helmet stolen by Autolycus, the 
son of Hermes. | 

29. The position in the Greek mind of 
Hermes as the lord of cloud is, however, 
more mystic and ideal than that of any 
other deity, just on account of the constant 
and real presence of the cloud itself under 
different forms, giving rise to all kinds of 
minor fables. The play of the Greek imag- 
ination in this direction is so wide and com- 
plex, that I cannot even give you an out- 
line of its range in my present limits. There 
is first a great series of storm-legends con- 
nected with the family of the historic Xolus 
eentralized by the story of Athamas, with 


The Queen of the Air. 51 


his two wives, ‘‘ the Cloud”’ and the “‘ White 
Goddess,” ending in that of Phrixus and 
Helle, and of the golden fleece (which is 
Only the cloud-burden of. Hermes Erio- 
phoros). With this, there is the fate of Sal- 
moneus, and the destruction of Glaucus by 
his own horses; all these minor myths of 
‘storm concentrating themselves darkly into 
the legend of Bellerophon and the Chimera, 
in which there is an under story about the 
vain subduing of passion and treachery, and 
the end oflife in fading melancholy,—which, 
I hope, not many of you could understand 
even were I to show it you (the. merely 
physical meaning of the Chimera is the 
cloud of volcanic lightning connected wholly 
with earth-fire, but resembling the heavenly 
cloud inits height and its thunder), Finally, 
in the AZolic group, there is the legend of 
Sisyphus, which I mean to work out 
thoroughly by itself; its root is in the posi- 
tion of Corinth as ruling the isthmus and the 
two seas—the Corinthean Acropolis, two 
thousand feet high, being the centre of the 
crossing currents of the winds, and of the 
commerce of Greece. Therefore, Athena, 
andthe fountain-cloud Pegasus, are more 


52 The Queen of the Air, 


closely connected with Corinth than even 
with Athens in their material, though not 
in their moral, power; and Sisyphus founds 
the Isthmian games in connection with a 
melancholy story about the sea gods; but 
but he himself is xépdwros dvipdy, the most 
‘gaining ” and subtle of men; who having 
the pkeya ofthe misthmus ebecomes mine 
type of transit, transfer, or trade, as such ; 
and of the apparent gain from it, which is 
not gain; and this is the real meaning of 
his punishment in hell—eternal toil and 
recoil (the modern idol of capital being, 
indeed, the stone of Sisyphus with a venge- 
ance, crushing in its recoil). But, through 
out, the old ideas of the cloud power and 
cloud feebleness,—the deceit of its hiding,— 

and the emptiness of its banishing,—the 
Autolycus enchantment of making black 
seem white,—and the disappointed fury of 
Ixion (taking shadow for power), mingle 
in the moral meaning of this and its collat- 
eral legends ; and give an aspect, at last, not 
only of foolish cunning, but of impiety or lif 
eral ‘‘idolatry,” ‘‘imagination worship,” to 
the dreams of avarice and injustice, until this 
notion ofatheism and insolent blindness bee’ 


The Queen of the Air, 5S 


comes principal ; andthe ‘‘ Clouds” of Aristo- 
phanes, with the personified ‘‘ just” and ‘‘un- 
just’ sayings in the latter part of the play, 
foreshadow, almost feature by feature, in all 
that they were written to mock and to chas- 
tise, the worst elements of the impious 
“dios” and tumult in men’s thoughts, 
which have followed on their avarice in the 
present day, making them alike forsake the 
laws of their ancient gods, and misappre- 
hended or reject the true words of their 
existing teachers. 

30. All this we have from the legends 
of the historic /Kolus only; but, besides 
these, there is the beautiful story of Semele, 
the mother of Bacchus. She is the cloud 
with the strength of the vine in its bosom, 
consumed by the ight which matures the 
fruit; the melting away of the cloud into the 
clear air at the fringe of its edges being ex- 
quisitely rendered by Pindar’s epithet for 
her, Semele, ‘‘ with the stretched-out hair” 
ravvébepa.) Then there is the entire tradi- 
tion of the Danaides, and of the tower of 
Danaé and golden shower; the birth of Per- 
seus connecting this legend with that of the 
Gorgons and Graiaw, who are the true clouds 


54 The Queen of the Air, 


of thunderous and ruinous tempest. I must, 
in passing, mark for you that the form of 
the sword or sickle of Perseus, with which 
he kills Medusa, is another image of the 
whirling harpy vortex, and belongs espe- 
cially to the sword of destruction or annihi- 
lation ; whence it is given te the two angels 
who gather for destruction the evil harvest 
and evil vintage of the earth (Rev. xiv. 15). 
I will collect afterwards and complete what 
Ihave already written respecting the Peg- 
asean and Gorgonian legends, noting here 
only what is necessary to explcin the cen- 
tral myth of Athena herself, who represents 
the ambient air, which included all cloud, 
and rain, and dew, and darkness, and peace, 
and wrath of heaven. Let me now try to 
give you, however briefly, some distinct 
idea of the several agencies of this great 
goddess. 
31. I. She is the air giving life and 
health to all animals. 
II. She is the air giving vegetative 
power to the earth. 
III, She is the air giving motion to 
the sea, and rendering naviga- 
tion possible. 


The Queen of the Air. ‘Se 


IV. She is the air nourishing artificial 
light, torch or lamplight; as 
opposed to that of the sun, on 
one hand, and of consuming* 
fire on the other. 

V. She isthe air conveying vibration 
of sound. 
._ I will give you instances of her agency in 
all these functions. | 

32. First, and chiefly, she is air as the 
spirit of life, giving vitality to the blood. 
SIer psychic relation to the vital force in 
matter lies deeper, and we will examine it 
afterwards ; but a great number of the most 
interesting passages in Homer regard her 
as flying over the earth in local and transi- 
tory strength, simply and merely the god- 
iless of fresh air. ; 

It is curious that the British city which 
has somewhat saucily styled itself the Mod- 
ern Athens is indeed more under her especial 
lutelage and favor in this respect than perhaps 
any other town inthe island. Athena is first 
simply what in the Modern Athens you so 
practically find her, the breeze of the mount- 


-_* Not a scientific, but a very practical and SONG 
_ distinction. 


56 The Queen of the Air. 


ain and the sea; and wherever she comes, 
there is purification, and health, and power. 
The sea-beach round this isle of ours is the 
frieze of our Parthenon; every wave that 
breaks on it thunders with Athena’s voice ; 
nay, Whenever you throw your window 
wide open in the morning, you Ict in Athena, 
as wisdom and fresh air at the same instant ; 
and whenever you draw a pure, long, full 
breath of right heaven, you take Athena into 
your heart, through your blood ; and, with 
the blood, into the thoughts of your brain. 

Now, this giving of strength by the air, 
observe, is mechanical as well as chemical. 
You cannot strike a good blow but with 
your chest full ; and, in hand to hand fight- 
ing, itis not the muscle that fails first, it is 
the breath; the longest-breathed will, on 
the average, be the victor,—not the strong- 
est. Note how Shakspeare always leans on 
this. Of Mortimer, in ‘‘ changing hardi- 
ment with great Glendower” : 
“Three times they breathed, and three times did 

they drink, 

Upon agreement, of swift Severn’s flood.”’ 
And again, Hotspur, sending challenge to 
Prince Harry ; 


The Queen of the Air. 57 


“ That none might draw short breath to-day 
But I and Harry Monmouth.” 


Again, of Hamlet, before he receives his 
wound : 


“T1e’s fat, and scant of breath.” 
‘gain, Orlando in the wrestling : 


“Yes; I beseech your grace 
I am not yet well breathed.’’ 


Now, of all the people that ever lived, the 
Yzreeks knew best what breath meant, both 
jn exercise and in battle, and therefore the 
yueen of the air becomes to them at once the 
qjueen of bodily strength in war; not mere 
}rutal muscular strength,—that belongs to 
#\res, —but the strength of young lives passed 
An pure air. and swift exercise,—Camilla’s 
Yirginal force, that ‘‘flies o’er the unbending 
corn, and skims along the main.” 

33. Now I will rapidly give you two or 
three instances of her direct agency in this 
d{unction. First, when she wants to make 
fenelope bright and beautiful; and to do 
away with the signs of her waiting and her 
grief. ‘‘Then Athena thought of another 
thing; she laid her into deep sleep, and 


58 The Queen of the Air. 

loosed all her limbs; and made her. taller, 
and made her smoother, and fatter, and 
whiter than sawn ivory ;. and breathed am- 
brosial brightness over her face ; and so she 
left her and went up to heaven.” Fresh air 
and sound sleep at night, young ladies! 
Yousee you may have Athena for lady’s maid 
whenever you choose. Next, hark how she 
gives strength to Achilles when he is broken 
with fasting and grief. Jupiter pities him 
and says to her, ‘‘ ‘ Daughter mine, are you 
forsaking your own soldier, and don’t you 
care for Achilles any more? See how hun- 
ery and weak he is,—go and feed him with 
ambrosia.’ So he urged the eager Athena; 
and she leaped down out of heaven like a 
harpy falcon, shrill-voiced; and she poured 
nectar and ambrosia, full of delight, into 
the breast of Achilles, that his limbs might 
not fail with famine; then she returned 
to the solid dome of her strong father.” 
And then comes the great passage about 
Achilles arming—for which we have no time. 
But here is again Athena giving strength to 
the whole Greek army. She came as a fal- 
con to Achilles, straight at him, a sudden 
drift of breeze; but to the army she must 


The Queen of the Air. 59 


come widely, she sweeps around them all. 
‘‘As when Jupiter spreads the purple rain- 
bow over heaven, portending battle or cold 
storm, so Athena, wrapping herself round 
with a purple cloud, stooped to the Greek 
soldiers, and raised up eachofthem.” Note 
that purple, in Homer’s use of it, nearly 
always.means ‘‘fiery,” ‘‘full of light.”  I€ 
is the light of the rainbow, not the color of 
it, which Homer means you to think of. 

34. But the most curious passage of all, 
.and fullest of meaning, is when she gives 
strength to Menelaus, that he may stand un- 
wearied against Hector. He prays to her: 
‘And blue-eyed Athena was glad that he 
prayed to her, first; and she gave him 
strength in his shoulders, and in his limbs, 
and she gave him the courage ”—of what 
animal, do yousuppose? Had it been Nep- 
tune or Mars, they would have given him 
the courage of a bull, or a lion; but Athena 
gives himthe courage ofthe most fearless in 
attack of all creatures, small or great, and 
very small it is, but wholly incapable of 
terror,—she gives him the courage of a fly. . 

35. Now this simile of Homer’s is one of 
the best instances I can give you of the way 


60 3 The Queen of the Air. 


in which great writers seize truths uncons 
sciously which are for all time. It is only 
recent science which has completely shown 
the perfectness of this minute symbol of the 
power of Athena; proving that the insect’s 
flight and breath are co-ordinated ; that its 
wings are actually forcing-pumps, of which 
the stroke compcis the thoracic respiration ; 
and that it thus breathes and flies simultane- 
ously by the action of the same muscles, so 
that respiration is carried on most vigorously 
during flight, ‘‘ while the air-vessels, sup- 
plied by many pairs of lungs instead of one, 
traverse the organs of flight in far greater 
numbers than the capillary blood-vessels of 
our own system, and give enormous and un- 
tiring muscular power, a rapidity of action 
measured by thousands of strokes in the 
minute, and an endurance, by miles and 
hours of flight.” * 

Homer could not have known this ; neither 
that the buzzing of the fly was produced, as 
in a wind instrument, by aconstant current 
of airthrough the trachea. But he hadseen, 
and, doubtless, meant us to remember, the 
marvellous strength and swiftness of the 


* Ormerod; ‘“ Natural History of Wasps.’ 


The Queen of the Air, 61 


insect’s flight (the glance of the swallow it- 
selfis clumsy and slow compared to the dart- 
ing of common house-flies at play) ; he prob- 
ably attributed its murmur to the wings, but 
in this also there was a type of what we shall 
presently find recognized in the name of 
Pallas,—the vibratory power of the air to 
convey sound, while, as a purifying creature, 
the fly holds its place beside the old symbol 
of Athena in Egypt, the vulture; and as a 
venomous and tormenting creature has more 
than the strength cf the serpent in proportion 
to its size, being thus entirely representative 
‘of the influence of the air both in purification 
and pestilence ; and its courage is so notable 
that, strangely enough, forgetting Homer’s 
simile, I happened to take the fly for an ex- 
pression of the audacity of freedom in speak~ 
ing of quite another subject.* Whether it 
should be called courage, or mere mechan- 
ical instinct, may be questioned, but assur- 
edly no other animal, exposed to continual 
danger, is so absolutely without sign of fear. 

36. You will, perhaps, have still patience 
to hear two instances, not of the communi- 
cation as strength, but of the personal agency 


* See farther on, § 148, pp. 154-156, 


62 The Queen of the Air. 


of Athena as the air. When she comes 
down to help Diomed against Ares, she does 
not come to fight instead of him, but she 
takes his charioteer’s place. 


“ She snatched the reins, she lashed with all her force, 
And full on Mars impelled the foaming horse.” 


Ares is the first to cast his spear; then— 
note this—Pope says : 


“Pallas opposed her hand, and caused to glance, 
Far from the car, the strong immortal lance.” 


She does not oppose her hand in the Greek 
—the wind could not meet the lance straight 
—she catches it in her hand, and throws it 
off. There is no instance in which a lance 
is so parried by a mortal hand in all the Iliad, © 
and it is exactly the way the wind would 
parry it, catching it, and turning it aside. 
If there are any good rifleshots here, they 
know something about Athena’s parrying ; 
and in old times the English masters of 
feathered artillery knew more yet. Compare 
also the turning of Hector’s lance from 
Achilles : Iliad, xx. 439. 

37. The last instance I will give you is as 
lovely as itis subtile. Throughout the Iliad, 


Tbe Queen of the Hit, 63 


Athena is herself the will or Menis of Achilles. 
If he is to be calmed, it is she who calms 
him; if angered, it is she who inflames him. 
In the first quarrel with Atreides, when. he 
stands at pause, with the great sword half 
drawn, ‘‘ Athena came from heaven, and 
stood behind him and caught him by the 
yellow hair.” Another god would have 
stayed his hand upon the hilt, but Athena © 
only lifts his hair. ‘‘And he turned and 
knew her, and her dreadful eyes shone upon 
him.” There is an exquisite tenderness in 
this laying her hand upon his hair, for it is 
the talisman of his life, vowed to his own 
Thessalian river if he ever returned to its 
shore, and cast upon Patroclus’ pile, so or- 
daining that there should be no return. 

38. Secondly, Athena is the air giving 
vegetative impulse to the earth. She is the 
wind and the rain, and yet more the pure air 
itself, getting at the earth fresh turned by 
spade or plough, and, above all, feeding the 
fresh leaves ; for though the Greeks knew 
nothing about carbonic acid, they did know 
that trees fed on the air. 

Now, note first in this, the myth of the air 
getting at ploughed ground. You know I 


64 The Queen of the Air. 


told you the Lord ofall labor by which man 
lived was Hephestus; therefore Athena 
adopts a child of his, and of the Earth,— 
Erichthonius,—literally, ‘‘the tearer up of 
the ground,” who is the head (though not in 
direct line) of the kings of Attica; and, hav- 
ing adopted him, she gives him to be brought 
up by the three nymphs of the dew. Of 
these, Aglauros, the dweller in the fields, is 
the envy or malice ofthe earth ; she answers 
nearly to the envy of Cain, the tiller of the 
ground, against his shepherd brother, in her 
own envy against her two sisters, Herse, the 
cloud dew, who is the beloved of the shep- 
herd Mercury; and Pandrosos, the diffused 
dew, ordew of heaven. Literally, you have 
in this myth the words of the blessing of 
Esau : ‘‘Thy dwelling shall be ofthe fatness 
of the earth, and of the dew of heaven from 
above.” Aglauros is for her envy turned 
into a black stone; and hers is one of the 
voices—the other being that of Cain—which 
haunts the circle of envy in the Purgatory : 
“ To sono Aglauro, chi divenne sasso.” 
But to hertwo sisters, with Erichthonius (or 
the hero Erectheus), is built the most sacred 
semple of Athena in Athens ; the temple to 


The Queen of the Air. 65 


their own dearest Athena—to her, andto the 
dew together; so that it was divided into 
two parts: one, the temple of Athena of the 
Ciiyeand the other that ofthe dew. And 
this expression of her power, as the air bring- 
ing the dew to the hill pastures, in the cen- 
tral temple of the central city of the heathen, 
dominant over the future intellectual world, 
is, of all the facts connected with her. wor- 
ship as the spirit of life, perhaps the most 
important. J have no time now to trace for 
you the hundredth part of the different ways 
in which it bears both upon natural beauty, 
and on the best order and happiness of men’s 
lives. I hope to follow out some of these 
trains of thought in gathering together what 
I have to say about field herbage; but I 
must say bricfly here that the great sign, to 
the Greeks, of the coming of spring in the 
pastures, was not, as with us, in the prim- 
rose, but in the various flowers of the as- 
phodel tribe (of which I will give you some 
separate account presently) ; therefore it is 
that the earth answers with crocus flame to 
the cloud on Ida; and the power of Athena 
in eternal life is written by the light of the 


asphodel on the Elysian fields, 
5 


66 The Queen of the Air. 


But further, Athena is the air, not only to 
the lilies of the field, but to the leaves of the 
forest. We saw before the reason why 
Hermes is said to be the son of Maia, the 
eldest of the sister stars of spring. Those 
stars are called not only Pleiades, but Ver- 
giliz, from a word mingling the ideas of the 
‘turning or returning of springtime with the 
outpouring of rain. The mother of Vergil 
bearing the name of Maia, Vergil himself 
received his name from the seven stars ; 
and he, in forming first the mind of Dante, 
and through him that of Chaucer (besides 
whatever special minor influence came from 
the Pastorals and Georgics) became the 
fountain-head of all the best literary power 
connected with the love of vegetative 
nature among civilized races of men. 
Take the fact for what it is worth; still it 
is a strange seal of coincidence, in word 
and in reality, upon the Greek dream of 
the power over human life, and its purest 
thoughts, in the stars of spring. But the 
first syllable of the name of Vergil has rela- 
tion also to another group of words, of which 
the English ones, virtue and virgin, bring 
down the force to modern days. It is a 


The Queen of the Hit. 67 


group containing mainly the idea of “spring,” 
or increase of life in vegetation—the rising 
of the new branch of the tree out of the bud, 
and of the new leaf out of the ground. It 
involves, secondarily, the idea of greenness 
and of strength, but primarily, that of living 
increase of a new rod from astock, stem, or 
root (‘‘There shall come forth a rod out of 
the stem of Jesse”); and chiefly the stem of 
certain plants—either of the rose tribe, as in 
the budding ofthe almond rod of Aaron ; or 
of the olive tribe, which has triple signifi- 
cance in this symbolism, from the use of its 
oil for sacred anointing, for strength in the 
gymnasium, and for light. Hence, in 
numberless divided and reflected ways, it is. 
connected with the power of Hercules and 
Athena: Hercules plants the wild olive, for 
its shade, on the course of Olympia, and it - 
thenceforward gives the Olympic crown of 
consummate honor and rest; while the 
prize at the Panathenaic games is a vase of 
its oil (meaning encouragement to continu- 
ance of effort); and from the paintings on 
these Panathenaic vases we get the most 
precious clue to the entire character of 
Athena. Then to express its propazction by 


68 The Queen of the Air. 


slips, the trees from which the oil was to be 
taken were called ‘‘ Moriai,” trees of division 
(being all descendants of the sacred one in 
the Erechtheum). And thus, in one direc- 
tion, we get tothe ‘‘ children like olive plants 
round about thy table” and the olive graft- 
in@-01 ol. Pauls while the use ofthe oilsor 
anointing gives chief name to the rod itself 
of the stem of Jesse, and to all those who 
‘were by that name signed for his disciples 
first in Antioch. Remember, further, since 
that name was first given the influence of 
the symbol, both in extreme unction and in 
consecration of priests and kings to their 
*‘ divine rizht ;” and think, if youcan reach 
‘with any grasp of thought, what the influence 
on the earth has been, of those twisted 
‘branches whose leaves give gray bloom to 
the hillsides under every breeze that blows 
from the midland sea. But, above and be- 
yond all, think how strange it is that the 
chief Agonia of humanity, and the chief 
giving of strength from heaven for its fulfil- 
ment, should have been under its night 
shadow in Palestine. 

39. ‘Thirdly, Athena is the air in its power 
over the sea, 


Che Queen of the Air. 69 


On the earliest Panathenaic vase known— 
the “ Burgon” vase in the British. museum— 
Athena hasa dolphin on her shield. The 
dolphin has two principal meanings in Greek 
symbolism. It means, first, the sea; sec- 
ondarily, the ascending and descending 
course of any of the heavenly bodies from 
one sea horizon to another—the dolphins’ 
arching rise and replunge (in a summer 
evening, out of calm sea, their black backs 
roll round with exactly the slow motion of a 
water-wheel ; but I do not know how far 
Aristotle’s exaggerated account of their leap- 
ing or their swiftness has any foundation) 
being taken as a type of the emergence of 
the sun or stars from the sea in the east, and 
plunging beneathin the west. Hence, Apollo, 
when in his personal power he crosses the 
sea, leading his Cretan colonists to Pytho, 
takes the form of a dolphin, becomes Apollo 
Delphinius, and names the founded colony 
*‘Delphi.” The lovely drawing of the Del- 
phic Apollo on the hydria of the Vatican (Le 
Normand and De Witte, vol. ii. p. 6) gives 
the entire conception of this myth. Again, 
the beautiful coins of Tarentum represent 
Taras coming to found the city, riding ona 


70 The Queen of the Air. 


dolphin, whose leaps and plunges have 
partly the rage of the sea in them, and partly 
the spring of the horse, because the splendid 
riding of the Tarentines had made their 
name proverbial in Magna Grecia. The 
story of Arion is a collateral fragment of the 
same thought; and, again, the plunge, 
before their transformation, of the ships of 
fEneas. Then, this idea of career upon, or 
conquest of, the sea, either by the creatures 
themselves, or by dolphin-like ships (com- 
pare the Merlin prophecy, 


“ They shall ride 
Over ocean wide 
With hempen bridle, and horse of tree,”) 


connects itself with the thought of undula- 
tion, and of the wave-power in the sea 
itself, which is always expressed by the ser- 
pentine bodies either of the sea-gods or of the 
sea-horse ; and when Athena carries, as she - 
does often in later work, a serpent for her 
shield-sign, it is notso much the repetition 
of her own egis-snakes as the further expres- 
sion ofher power over the sea-wave ; which, 
finally, Vergil gives in its perfect unity with 
her own anger, in the approach of the ser 


The Queen of the Air. vik: 


pents against Laocoén from the sea; and 
then, finally, when her own storm-power is 
fully put forth on the ocean also, and the 
madness of the egis-snake is given to the 
wave-snake, the sea-wave becomes the 
devouring hound at the waist of Scylla, and 
Athena takes Scylla for her helmet-crest ; 
while yet her beneficent and essential power 
on the ocean, in making navigation possible, 
is commemorated in the Panathenaic festival 
hy her peplus being carried to the Erech- 
heum suspended from the mast of a ship. 
In Plate cxv. of vol. ii., Le Normand, are 
given two sides of a vase, which, in rude 
and childish way, assembles most of the 
principal thoughts regarding Athena in this 
telation. In the first, the sunrise is repre- 
sented by the ascending chariot of Apollo, 
foreshortened ; the light is supposed to blind 
the eyes, and no face of the god is seen 
(Turner, in the Ulysses and Polyphemus 
sunrise, loses the form of the god in light, 
giving the chariot-horses only ; rendering in 
his own manner, after 2,200 years of various 
fall and revival of the arts, precisely the 
same thought as the old Greek potter). He 
-yscends out of the sea; but the sea itself 


72 The Queen of the Hir, 


has not yet caught the light. Inthe second 
design, Athena as the morning breeze, and 
Hermes as the morning cloud, fly over the 
sea before the sun. Hermes turns back his 
head; his face is unseen in the cloud, as 
Apollo’s in the light; the grotesque appear- 
ance of an animal’s face is only the cloud. 
phantasm modifying a frequent form of the 
hair of Hermes beneath the back of his cap. 
Under the morning breeze, the dolphins lear 
from the rippled sea, and their sides catch the; 
light. 

The coins of the Lucanian Heracleia give 
a fair representation of the helmed Athena, 
as imagined in later Greek art, with the 
embossed Scylla. 

40. Fourthly, Athena is the air nourish 
ing artificial light—unconsuming fire. There. 
fore, a lamp was always kept burning in the 
Erechtheum; and the torch-race belongs 
chiefly to her festival, of which the meaning 
is to show the danger of the perishing of the 
hight even by excess of the airthat nourishes 
3.3; and so that the race isnot to the swift, 
but to the wise. The household use of her 
constant light is symbolized in the lovely 
passage in the Odyssey, where Ulysses and 


The Queen of the Air. 73 


bis son move the armor while the servants 
are shut in their chambers, and there is no 
ene to hold torches for them ; but Athena 
herself, ‘‘ having a golden lamp,” fills all the 
tooms with light. Her presence in war- 
strength with her favorite heroes is always 
shown by the ‘‘unwearied ” fire hovering 
on their helmets and shields ; and the image 
gradually becomes constant and accepted, 
both for the maintenance of household 
rvatchfulness, as in the parable of the ten 
tirgins, or as the symbol of direct inspiration, 
in the rushing wind and divided flames of 
Pentecost ; but together with this thought of 
unconsuming and constant fire, there is 
ilways mingled in the Greek mind the sense 
of the consuming by excess, as of the flame 
by the air, so also of the inspired creature by 
its own fire (thus, again, ‘‘ the zeal of thine 
fiouse hath eaten me up ”—‘‘ my zeal hath 
consumed me, because of thine enemies,” 
and the like) ; and especially Athena has this 
aspect towards the truly sensual and _ bodily 
strength; so that to Ares, who is himself 
insane and consuming, the opposite wisdom 
seems to be insane and consuming: ‘‘ All 
we the other gods have thee against us, O 


74 The Queen of the Air. 


Jove! when we would give grace to meng 
for thou hast begotten the maid withouta 
mind—the mischievous creature, the doer of 
unseemly evil. All we obey thee, and 
are ruled by thee. Her only thou wilt not 
tesist in anything she says or does, because 
thou didst bear her—consuming child as 
she is.” 

41. Lastly, Athena is the air conveying 
vibration of sound. 

In all the loveliest representations in cen- 
tral Greek art of the birth of Athena, Apollo 
stands close to the sitting Jupiter, singing, 
with a deep, quiet joyfulness, to his lyre. 
The sun is always thought of asthe master 
of time and rhythm, and as the origin of the 
composing and inventive discovery of mel- 
ody ; but the air, as the actual element and 
substance of the voice, the prolonging and 
sustaining power of it, and the symbol ofits 
moral passion. Whateverin music is meas- 
ured and designed belongs therefore to Apollo 
and the Muses ; whatever is impulsive and 
passionate, to Athena; hence her constant 
strength a voice or cry (as when she aids 
the shout of Achilles) curiously opposed to 
the dumbness of Demeter, The Apolline 


The Queen of the Air. 5 


lyre, therefore, is not so much the instrument 
producing sound, as its measurer and divider 
by length or tension of string into given 
notes ; and I believe it is, in a double con- 
nection with its office as a measurer of time 
or motion and its relation to the transit of 
the sun in the sky, that Hermes forms it 
from the tortoise-shell, which is the image 
of the dappled concave of the cloudy sky. 
Thenceforward all the limiting or restraining 
modes of music belong to the Muses; but 
the passionate music is wind music, as in 
the Doric flute. Then, when this inspired 
music becomes degraded in its passion, it 
sinks into the pipe of Pan, and the double pipe 
of Marsyas, and is then rejected by Athena. 
The myth which represents her doing so is 
that she invented the double pipe from hear- 
ing the hiss of the Gorgonian serpents ; but 
when she played upon it, chancing to see 
her face reflectedin water, shesaw thatit was 
distorted, whereupon she threw down the 
flute which Marsyasfound. Then, the strife 
of Apollo and Marsyas represents the endur- 
ing contest between music in which the 
words and thought lead, and the lyre meas- 
ures or melodizes them (which Pindar means 


76 The Queen of the Air. 


when he calls his hymns ‘‘kings over the 
lyre”), and music in which the words are 
lost and the wind or impulse leads,—gener- 
ally, therefore, between intellectual, and 
brutal, or meaningless, music. Therefore, 
when Apollo prevails, he flays Marsyas, tak- 
ing the limit and external bond of his shape 
from him, which is death, without touching 
the mere muscular strength, yet shamefuland 
dreadful in dissolution. 

42. And the opposition of these two kinds 
of sound is continually dwelt upon by the 
Greek philosophers, the real fact at the root 
of all their teaching being this, that true 
music is the natural expression of a lofty 
passion for a right cause; that in proportion 
to the kingliness and force of any personal- 
ity, the expression either of its joy or suffer- 
ing becomes measured, chastened, calm, and 
capable of interpretation only by the majesty 
of ordered, beautiful, and worded sound. 
Exactly in proportion to the degree in which 
we become narrow in the cause and concep- 
tion of our passions, incontinent in the utter- 
ance of them, feeble of perseverance in them, 
sullied or shameful in the indulgence of 
them, their expression by musical sound be- 


The Queen of the Air. "7 


comes broken, mean, fatuitous, and at last 
impossible ; the measured waves of the air 
of heaven will not lend themselves to ex- 
pression of ultimate vice, it must be forever 
sunk into discordance orsilence. Andsince, 
as before statcd, every work of right art has 
a tendency to reproduce the ethical state 
which first developed it, this, which of all 
the arts is most directly ethical in origin, is 
also the most direct in power of discipline ; 
the first, the simplest, the most effective of 
all instruments of moral instruction ; while 
in the failure and betrayal of its functions, 
it becomes the subtlest aid of moral degra- 
dation. Music is thus, in her health, the 
teacher of perfect order, and is the voice of 
the obedience of angels, and the companion 
of the course of the spheres of heaven ; and 
in her depravity she is also the teacher of 
perfect disorder and disobedience, and the 
Gloria in Excelsis becomes the Marseillaise. 
In the third section of this volume, I reprint 
two chapters from another essay of mine 
(‘‘The Cestus of Aglaia”), on modesty or 
measure, and on liberty, containing further 
zeference to music in her two powers; and I 
do this now, because, among the many mon- 


78 The Queen of the Afr. 


3trous and misbegotten fantasies which ara 
the spawn of modern license, perhaps the 
most impishly opposite to the truth is the 
conception of music which has rendered 
possible the writing, by educated persons, 
and, more strangely yet, the tolerant criti- 
cism,, of such’ words. as these: ‘*\7/173) (so 
persuasive artis the only one thathas no didac- 
tic efficacy, thet engenders no emotions save 
such as are without issue on ihe side of moral 
truth, that expresses nothing of God, nothing 
of reason, nothing of human hoderty.” I will 
not give the author's name; the passage. is 
quoted in the ‘‘ Westminster Review” for 
last January [1869]. 

43. I must also anticipate something of 
what I have to say respecting the relation of 
the power of Athena to organic life, so far as 
to note that hcrname, Pallas, probably refers 
to the quivering or vibration of the air; and 
to its power, whether as vitalforce, or com- 
municated wave, over every kind of matter, 
in giving it vibratory movement ; first, and 
most intense, in the voice and throat of the 
bird, which is the air incarnate; and so de- 
scending through the various orders of ani- 
mal life to the vibrating and semi-voluntary 


The Queen of the Ait. 79 


murmur ofthe insect; and, lower still, to the 
hiss or quiver of the tail of the halflunged 
snake and deaf adder; all these, neverthe- 
less, being wholly under the rule of Athena 
as representing cither breath or vital nervous 
power; and, therefore, also, in thcir sim- 
plicity, the ‘‘oaten pipe and pastoral song,” 
which belong to her dominion over the as- 
phodel meadows, and breathe on their banks 
of violets. 

Finally, is it not strange to think of the 
influence of this one power of Pallas in vi- 
bration (we shall see a singular mechanical 
energy of it presently in the serpent’s mo- 
tion), inthe voices of warand peace? How 
much of the repose, how much of the wrath, 
folly, and misery of men, has literally de- 
pended on this one power of the air; onthe 
sound of the trumpet and of the bell, on the 
lark’s song, and the bee’s murmur ! 

44. Such is the general conception in the 
Greek mind of the physical power of Athena. 
The spiritual power associated with it is of 
two kinds: first, she is the Spirit of Life in 
material organism; not strength in the 
blood only, but formative energy in the 
clay; and, secondly, she is inspired and 


80 The Queen of the Ait. 


impulsive wisdom in human conduct and 
human art, giving the instinct of infallible 
decision, and of faultless invention. 

It is quite beyond the scope of my present 
purpose—and, indeed, will only be possible 
for me at all after marking the relative in- 
tention of the Apolline myths—to trace for 
you the Greek conception of Athena as the 
guide of moral passion. But I will at least 
endeavor, on some near occasion,* to define 
some of the actual truths respecting the vital 
force in created organism, and inventive 
fancy in the works of man, which are more 
or less expressed by the Greeks, under the 
personality of Athena. You would, per- 
haps, hardly bear with me if I endeavored 
further to show you—what is nevertheless 
perfectly true—the analogy between the 
spiritual power of Athena in her gentle min- 
istry, yet irresistible anger, with the ministry 
of another Spirit whom we also, holding for 
the universal power of life, are forbidden, at 
our worst peril, to quench or to grieve. 

4s. But, I think, to-night, you should not 


* T have tried to do this in mere outline in the two 
following sections of this volume. 


The Queen of the Air, 81 


fet me close without requiring of me an 
answer on one vital point, namely, how far 
these imaginations of gods—which are vain 
to us—were vain to those who had no better 
trust ? and whatreal belief the Greek had in 
these creations of his own spirit, practical 
and helpful to him in the sorrow of earth? 
{ am ableto answer you explicitly in this. 
The origin of his thoughts is often obscure, 
and we may err in endeavoring to account 
for their form of realization ; but the effect 
of that realization on his life is not obscure 
at all.) The Greek creed was, of course, 
different in its character, as our own creed 
is, according to the class of persons who 
held it. The common people's was quite 
literal, simple, and happy; their idea of 
Athena was as clear as a good Roman Cath- 
olic peasant’s idea of the Madonna. In 
Athens itself, the centre of thought and re- 
finement, Pisistratus obtained the reins of 
government through the ready belief of the 
populace that a beautiful woman, armed 
like Athena, was the goddess herself. Even 
at the close of the last century some of this 
simplicity remained among the inhabitants: 


of the Greek islands ; and when a pretty 
6 


82 The Queen of the Air. 


English lady first made her way into the 
grotto of Antiparos, she was surrounded, on 
her return, by all the women of theneighbor- 
ing village, believing her to be divine, and 
praying her to heal them of their sicknesses. 

46. Then, secondly, the creed of the 
upper classes was more refined and spiritual, 
but quite as honest, and evcn more forcible 
in its effect on the life. You might imagine 
that the employment of the artifice just 
referred to implied utter unbelief in the per- 
sons contriving it; but it really meant only 
that the more worldly of them would play 
with a popular faith for their own purposes, 
as doubly-minded persons have often done 
since, all the while sincerely holding the 
Same ideas themselves in a more abstract 
form ; while the good and unworldly men, 
the true Greek heroes, lived by their faith as 
firmly as St. Louis, or the Cid, or the Chev- 
alier Bayard. 

47. Then, thirdly, the faith of the poets 
and artists was, necessarily, less definite, 
being continually modified by the involun- 
tary action of their own fancies ; and by the 
necessity of presenting, in clear verbal or 
material form, things of which they had no 


The Queen of the Air. 83 


authoritative knowledge. Their faith was, 
insome respects, like Dante’s or Milton’s: 
firm in general conception, but not able to 
youch for every detail in the forms they gave 
it; but they went considerably farther, even 
in that minor sincerity, than subsequent 
yoets; and strove with all their might to be 
as nearthe truthastheycould, Pindarsays, 
quite simply, ‘‘I cannot think so-and-so of 
the gods. It must have been this way—it 
¢annot have been that way—that the thing 
yvas done.” And as late among the Latins 
ys the, days of Horace, this sincerity re- 
Inains. lTlorace is just as true and simple 
in his relizion as Wordsworth; but all 
power of understanding any cf the hon- 
est classic poets has been taken away from 
most English gentlemen by the mechanical 
drill in verse-writing atschool. “Throughout 
the whole of their lives afterwards, they 
never can get themselves quit of the notion 
ihat ail verses were written as an exercise, 
and that Minerva was only a convenient 
word for the last of ahexameter, and Jupiter 
for the last but one. 

48. It is impossible that any notion can 
ke more fallacious or more mislcading in its 


84 Tbe Queen of the Air. 


consequences. All great song, from the 
first day when human lips contrived sylla- 
bles, has been sincere song. With deliber- 
ate didactic. purpose the tragedians—with 
pure and native passion the lyrists—fitted 
their perfect words to their dearest faiths. 
‘‘Operosa parvus carmina fingo.” ‘‘I, little 
thing that Iam, weave my laborious songs ” 
as earnestly as the bee among the bells of 
thyme on the Matin mountains. Yes, and 
he dedicates his favorite pine to Diana, and 
he chants his autumnal hymn to the Faun 
that guards his fields, and he guides the 
noble youth and maids of Rome in their 
choir to Apollo,and he tells the farmer’s 
little girl that the gods will love her, though 
she has only a handful of salt and meal to 
give them—just as earnestly as ever English 
gentleman taught Christian faith to English 
youth in England’s truest days. 

49. Then, lastly, the creed of the philos- 
ophers of sages varied according to the char- 
acter and knowledge of each; their relative 
acquaintance with the secrets of natural 
science, their intellectual and sectarian ego- 
tism, and their mystic or monastic tenden- 
cies, for there is a classic as well as a medi- 


Che Queen of the Hit, 85 


ceval monasticism. They end in losing the 
life of Greece in play upon words ; but we 
owe to their early thought some of the sound- 
est ethics, and the foundation of the best 
practical laws, yet known to mankind. 

50. Such was the general vitality of the 
heathen creed in its strength. Of its direct 
influence on conduct, it is, as I said, impos- ~ 
sible for me to speak now; only, remem- 
ber always, in endeavoring to form a judg- 
ment of it, that what of good or right the 
heathens did, they did looking forno reward. 
The purest forms of our own religion have 
always consisted in sacrificing less things 
to win greater, time to win eternity, the 
world to win the skies. The order, ‘‘ Sell 
that thou hast,” is not given without the 
promise, ‘‘ Thou shalt have treasure in 
heaven ;” and well for the modern Chris- 
tian if he accepts the alternative as his 
Master left it, and does not practically read 
the command and promise thus: ‘‘Sell 
that thou hast in the best market, and 
thou shalt have treasure in eternity also.” 
But the poor Greeks of the great ages 
expected no reward from heaven but honor, 
and noreward from earth but rest; though, 


86 The Queen of the Air, 


when, on those conditions, they patiently, 
and proudly, fulfilled their task of the 
granted day, an unreasoning instinct of an 
immortal benediction broke from their lips 
in song ; and they, even they, had some- 
times a prophet to tellthem of a land ‘‘ whcre 
there is sun alike by day and alike by night, 
where they shall need no more to trouble the 
earth by strength of hands for daily bread ; 
but the ocean breezes blow around the 
blessed islands, and golden flowers burn on 
their bright trees for evermore,” 


Tbe Queen of the Air, 8p 


Rams 


ATHENA KERAMITIS-* 


(Athena in the Earth.) 


STUDY, SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PRECEDING LECT= 
URE, OF THE SUPPOSED AND ACTUAL RELATIONS 
OF ATHENA TO THE VITAL FORCE IN MATERIAL 
ORGANISM. 


sy. Ir has been easy to decipher approxi- 
_snately the Greek conception ofthe physical 
power of Athena in cloud and sky, because 
we know ourselves what clouds and skies 
are, and what the force of the wind is in 
forming them. But it is not at all easy to 
trace the Greck thoughts about the power of 
Athena in giving life, because we do not our- 
selves know clearly what life is, or in what 
way the air is necessary to it, or what there 
's, besides the air, shaping the forms that it 


* “ Athena, fit for being made into pottery.’’ TIcoin 
the expression as a counterpart of 77 wap0éma, “ Clay 
“tact.” 


88 The Queen of the Air. 


is putinto. And it is comparatively of small 
consequence to find out what the Greeks 
thought or meant, until we have determined 
what we ourselves think, or mean, when we 
translate the Greek word for ‘‘ breathing” 
into the Latin-English word ‘‘ spirit.” 

52. But it is of great consequence that 
you should fix in your minds—and _ hold, 
against the baseness of mere materialism on 
the one hand, and against the fallacies of 
controversial speculation on the other—the 
certain and practical sense of this word 
‘‘spirit ;” the sense in which you all know 
that its reality exists, as the power which 
shaped you into your shape, and by which | 
‘you love and hate when you have received 
that shape. You need not fear, onthe one 
hand, that either the sculpturing or the lov- 
ing power can evcr be beaten down by the 
philosophers into ametal, orevolved by them 
into a gas; but on the other hand, take care 
that you yourself, in trying to elevate your 
conception of it, do not lose its truth in a 
dream, or even ina word. Beware always 
of contending for words: you will find them 
not easy to grasp, if you know them in sev- 
eral languages. This very word, which is 


The Queen of the Afr. 89 


so solemn in your mouths, is one of the most 
dcubtful. In Latin it means little more than 
breathing, and may mean merely accent ; in 
French it is not breath, but wit, and our 
neighbors are therefore obliged, even in 
their most solemn expressions, tosay ‘‘ wit” 
when we say ‘‘ vhost.” In Greek, ‘‘pneuma,” 
the word we translate ‘‘ rhost,” means either 
wind or breath, and the relative word 
‘‘psyche” has, perhaps, a more subtle 
power; yet St. Paul’s words ‘‘ pneumatic 
body” and ‘‘psychic body” involve a dif- 
ference in his mind which no words will ex- 
plain. But in Greek and in English, and in 
Saxon and in Hebrew, and in every articu- 
late tonguc of humanity the ‘‘spirit of man” 
truly means his passion and virtue, and is 
stately according to the height of his con- 
ception, and stable according to the meas- 
ure of his endurance. 

53. Endurance, or patience, that is the 
central sign of spirit; a constancy against 
the cold and agony of death; and as, phys- 
ically, it is by the burning power of the air 
that the heat of the flesh is sustained, so this 
Athena, spiritually, is the queen of all glow- 
“ng virtue, the unconsuming fire and inner 


90 The Queen of the Air. 


lamp of life. And thus, as Hephestus is 
lord of the fire of the hand, and Apollo of the 
fire of the brain, so Athena ofthe fire of the 
heart ; and as Hercules wears for his chief 
armor the skin of the Nemean lion, his chief 
enemy, whom he slew ; and Apollo has for 
his highest name ‘‘the Pythian,” from his 
chief enemy, the Python slain; so Athena 
bears always on her breast the deadly face 
of her chief enemy slain, the Gorgonian cold, 
and venomous agony, that turns living men 
to stone. 

54. And so long as you have that fire of 
the heart within you, and know the reality 
of it, you need be under no alarm as to the 
possibility of its chemical cr mechanical 
analysis. The philosophers are very humor- 
ous in their ecstasy cf hope about it; but 
the real interest of their discoveries in this 
direction is very small to humankind. It is 
quite true that the tympanum of the ear vi- 
brates under sound, and that the surface of 
the water in a ditch vibrates too; but the 
ditch hears nothing for all that; and my 
hearing is still to me as blessed a mystery as 
ever, and the interval between the ditch and 
me quite asgreat. Ifthe trembling sound 


The Queen of the Air. 91 


in my ears was once of the marriage-bell 
which began my happiness, and is now of 
the passing-bell which ends it, the difference 
between those two sounds to me cannot be 
counted by the number of concussions. 
There have been some curious speculations 
lately as to the conveyance of mental con- 
sciousness by ‘‘brain-waves.” What does 
it) matter how it is conveyed? The con- 
Sciousness itself is nota wave. It may be. 
accompanied here or there by any quantity 
of quivers and shakes, up or down, of any- 
thing you can find in the universe that is 
shakable—what is thattome? My friendis 
dead, and my—according to modern views— 
vibratory sorrow is not one whit less, or less 
mysterious, to me, than my old quiet one. 
55. Beyond, and entirely unaffected by, 
any questionings of this kind, there are, 
therefore, two plain facts which we should 
all know: first, that there is a power which 
gives their several shapes to things, or ca- 
pacities of shape; and, secondly, a power 
which gives them their several feelings, or 
capacities of feeling ; and that we can in- 
crease or destroy both of these at our will. 
By care and tenderness, we can extend the 


92 Tbe Queen of the Hir. 


range of lovely life in plants and animals ¢ 
by our neglect and cruelty, we can arrest it, 
and bring pestilence in its stead. Again, 
by right discipline we can increase our 
strength of noble will and passion or destroy 
both. And whether these two forces are 
local conditions of the elements in which 
they appear, or are part of a great force in 
the universe, out of which they are taken, 
and to which they must be restored, is not 
of the slightest importance to us in dealing 
with them ; neither is the manner of their 
connection withlight andair. What precise 
meaning we ought to attach to expressions 
such as that of the prophecy to the four 
winds that the dry bones might be breathed 
upon, and might live, or why the presence 
of the vital power shou!d be dependent on 
the chemical action cf the air, and its awful 
passing away materially signified by the 
rendering up of that breath or ghost, wecan- 
not at present know, and need not at any 
time dispute. What we assuredly know is 
that the states of life and death are different, 
and the first more desirable than the other, 
and by effort attainable, whether we under- 
gtand being ‘‘born of the spirit” to signify 


Tbe Queen of the Hir, 93 


having the breath of heaven in our flesh, or 
its power in our hearts. 

56. As to its power on the body, I will 
endeavor to tell you, having been myself 
much led into studies involving necessary 
reference both to natural science and mental 
phenomena, what, at least, remains to us 
after science has done its worst; what the 
myth of Athena, as a formative and decisive 
power, a spirit of creation and volition, must 
eternally mean for all of us. 

57. It is now (I believe I may use the 
strong word) ‘‘ascertained” that heat and 
motion are fixed in quantity, and measurable 
in the portions that we deal with. We can 
measure out portions of power, as we can 
measure portions of space; while yet, as 
far as we know, space may be infinite, and 
force infinite. There may be heat as much 
greater than the sun’s, as the sun’s heat is 
greater than a candle’s: and force as much 
greater than the force by which the world 
swings, as that is greater than the force by 
which a cobweb trembles. Now, on heat 
and force, life is inseparably dependent ; and 
I believe, also, on a form of substance, 
which the philosophers call ‘‘ protoplasm.” 


94 The Queen of the Hi. 


I wish they would use English instead of 
Greek words. When I want to know why 
aleaf is green, they tell me it is colored by 
‘‘chlorophyll,” which at first sounds very 
instructive ; but if they would only say 
plainly that a leaf is colored green by a thing 
which is called ‘‘ green leaf,” we should see 
more precisely how farwe had got. How- 
ever, itis a curious fact that lifeis connected 
with a cellular structure called protoplasm, 
or in: English, ‘‘first” stuck ‘together 5” 
whence, conceivably through deuteroplasms, 
or second stickings, and tritoplasms, or third 
stickings, * we reach the highest plastic phase 
in the human pottery, which differs from 
common chinaware, primarily, by a meas- 
urable degree of heat, developed in breath- 
ing, which it borrows from the rest of the 
* Or, perhaps, we may be indulged with one consum- 
mating gleam of “ glycasm,” visible “ Sweetness,” —ac- 
cording to the good old monk, “ Full moon,’’ or “ All 
moonshine.” I cannot get at his original Greek, but 
am content with M. Durand’s clear French (Manuel 
d’Iconographie Chrétienne, Paris, 1845): ‘ Lorsque 
vous aurez fait le proplasme, et esquissé un visage, vous 
ferez les chairs avec le glycasme dont nous avons don: 
né la recette. Chez les vieillards, vous indiquerez les 
rides, et chez les jeunes gens, les angles dez yeux 
C’est ainsi qui l’on fait les chairs, suivant Panselinas.” 


The Queen of the Air. 95 


universe while it lives, and which it as cer- 
tainly returns to the rest of the universe, 
when it dies. 

58. Again, with this heat certain assimi- 
lative powers are connected, which the tend- 
ency ofrecent discovery is to simplify more 
and more into modes of one force ; or finally 
into mere motion, communicable in various 
states, but not destructible. Wewillassume 
that science has done its utmost; and that 
every chemical or animal force is demon- 
strably resolvable into heat or motion, re- 
ciprocally changing into each other. I 
would myself like better, in order of thought, 
to consider motion as a mode of heat than 
heat as a mode of motion; still, granting 
that we have got thus far, we have yet to 
ask, What is heat? or what motion? What 
is this ‘‘primo mobile,” this transitional 
power, in which all things live, and move, 
and have their being? Itis by definition 
something different from matter, and we may 
call it as we choose, ‘‘ first cause,” or ‘‘ first 
light,” or ‘‘ first heat ;” but we can show no 
scientific proof of its not being personal, and 
coinciding with the ordinary conception of 
a supporting spirit in all things, 


* -_———_4 


96 The Queen of the Afr. 


59. Still, it is not advisable to apply the 
word ‘‘spirit” or ‘‘ breathing ” to it, while it 
is only enforcing chemical affinities ; but, 
when the chemical affinities are brought 
under the influence of the air, and of the 
sun’s heat, the formative force enters an 
entirely different phase. It does not now 
merely crystallize indefinite masses, but it 
gives to limited portions of matter the power 
of gathering, selectively, other elements 
proper to them, and binding these elements 
into their own peculiar and adopted form. 

This force; now sproperly called aie son 
breathing, or spirit, is continually creating 
its own shell of definite shape out of the 
wreck round it ; and this is what I meant by 
Saying, in the “‘ Ethics ofthe Dust,” “you 
may always stand by form against force.” 
For the mere force of junction is not spirit ; 
but the power that catches out of chaos 
charcoal, water, lime, or what not, and fas- 
tens them down intoa given form, is properly 
called ‘‘ spirit ;” and we shall not diminish, 
but strengthen our conception of this creative 
energy by recognizing its presence in lower 
states of matter than our own; such recogni- 
tion being enforced upon us by delight we in- 


The Queen of the Air. 97. 


stinctively receive from all the forms of mat- 
ter which manifest it; and yet more, by the 
glorifying of those forms, in the parts of 
them that are most animated, with the colors 
that are pleasantest tooursenses. The most 
familiar instance of this is the best, and also 
the most wonderful: the blossoming of plants. 

60. The spirit in the plant—that is to say, 
its power of gathering dead matter out of 
the wreck round it, and shaping it into its 
own chosen shape—is of course strongest at 
the moment of its flowering, for it then not 
only gathers, but forms, with the greatest 
energy. 

And where this life is in it at full power, 
its form becomes invested with aspects that 
are chiefly delightful to our own human 
passions; namely, first, with the loveliest 
outlines cf shape; and, secondly, with the 
most brilliant phases of the primary colors, 
blue, yellow, andred or white, the unison 
of all; and, to make it all morestrange, this 
time of peculiar and perfect glory is associ- 
ated with relations of the plants or blossoms 
to each other, correspondent to the joy of 
love in human creatures, and having the 
same object in the continuance of the race, 


7 


98 Tbe Queen of the Air. 


Only, with respect to plants, as animals, we 
are wrong in speaking as if the object of 
this strong life were only the bequeathing of 
itself. The flower is the end or proper ob- 
ject of the seed, not theseed ofthe flower. 
The reason for seeds is that flowers may 
be; not the reason of flowers that seeds 
may be. The flower itself is the creature 
which the spirit makes ; only, in connection 
with its perfectness is placed the giving birth 
to its successor. 

61. The main fact, then, about a flower 
is that it is the part of the plant’s form de- 
veloped at the moment of its intensest life ; 
and this inner rapture is usually marked 
externally for us by the flush of one or more 
of the primary colors. What the character 
of the flower shall be, depends entirely upon 
the portion of the plant into which this rapt- 
ure of spirit has been put. Sometimes the 
life is put into its outer sheath, and then the 
outer sheath becomes white and pure, and 
full of strength and grace; sometimes the 
life is put into the common leaves, just un- 
der the blossom, and they become scarlet or 
purple; sometimes the life is put into the 
stalks of the flower and they flush blue; 


The Queen of the Hir. 99 


sometimes into its outer enclosure or calyx}; 
mostly into its inner cup; but, in all cases, 
the presence of the strongest life is asserted 
by characters in which the human sight 
takes pleasure, and which seem prepared 
with distinct reference to us, or rathcr, bear, 
in being delightful, evidence of having been 
produced by the power of the same spirit as 
Our own. 

62, And we are led to feel this still more, 
strongly because all the distinctions of spe- 
cies,* both in plants and animals, appearsto 
have similar connection with human char- 
acter. | Whatever the origin of species may 
be, or however those species, once formed, 
may be influenced by external accident, the 
groups into which birth or accident reduce 
them have distinct relation to the spirit of 
man. Itis perfectly possible, and ultimately 


* The facts on which I am about to dwell are in na- 
wise antagonistic to the theories which Mr. Darwin’s 
unwearied and unerring investigations are every day 
rendering more probable. The esthetic relations of 
species are independent of their origin. Nevertheless, 
it has always seemed to me, in what little work I have 
done upon organic forms, as if the species mocked us 
by their deliberate imitation of each other when they 
met; yet did not pass one into another. 


100 The Queen of the Air. 


conceivable, that the crocodile and the lamb 
may have descended from the same ances- 
tral atom of protoplasm ; and that the phys- 
ical laws of the operation of calcareous slime 
and of meadow grass, on that protoplasm, 
may in time have developed the opposite 
natures and aspects of the living frames ; but 
the practically important fact for us is the 
existence of a power which creates that cal- 
careous earth itself,—which creates, that 
separately—and quartz, separately ; and 
gold, separately ; and charcoal, separately ; 
and then so directs the relation of these ele- 
ments as that the gold shall destroy the souls 
of men by being yellow; and the charcoal 
destroy their souls by being hard and bright ; 
and the quartz represent to them an ideal 
purity ; and the calcareous earth, soft, shall 
beget crocodiles, and dry and hard, shcep ; 
and that the aspects and qualities of these 
two products, crocodiles and lambs, shall be, 
thesone repellent to the/spiitvof man, the 
other attractive toit, in a quite inevitable 
way ; representing to him states of moral 
evil and good ; and becoming myths to him 
of destruction or redemption, and, in the 
most literal sense, ‘‘ words” of God. 


The Queen of the Afr, 108 


63. And the force of these facts cannot 
be escaped from by the thought that there 
are species innumerable, passing intoeach 
other by recular gradations, out of which we 
choose what we must love “r dread, andsay 
they were indeed prepared for us. Species 
are not innumerable; neithcr are they now 
connected by consistent gradation. They 
touch at certain points only ; and even then 
are connected, when we examine them 
deeply, in a kind of reticulated way, not in 
chains, but in chequers ; also, however con- 
nected, it is but by a touch of the extremities, 
as it were, and the characteristic form of 
the species is entirely individual. The rose 
nearly sinks into a grass in the sanguisorba $} 
but the formative spirit does not the less 
clearly separate the ear of wheat from the 
dog-rose, and oscillate with tremulous con- 
stancy round the central forms of both, hav- 
ing each their due relation to the mind of 
man. The great animal kingdoms are con- 
nected in thesame way. The bird through 
the penguin drops towards the fish, and the 
fish in the cetacean reascends to the mam- 
mal, yet there is no confusion of thought 
possible between the perfect forms of an 


102 The Queen of the Afr, 


eagle, a trout, and a war-horse, in their 
relations to the elements, and to man. 

64. Now we have two orders of animals to 
take some note of in connection with Athena, 
and one vast order of plants, which will 
illustrate this matter very sufficiently for us. 

The orders of animals are the serpent and 
the bird: the serpent, in which the breath or 
spirit is less than in any other creature, and 
the earth-power greatest ; the bird, in which 
the breath or spirit is more full than in any 
other creature, and the earth-power least. 

65. We will take the bird first. It is little 
more than a drift of the air brought into 
form by plumes; the air is in all its quills, it 
breathes through its whole frame and flesh 
and glows with air in its flying, like blown 
flames ; it rests upon the air, subdues it, sur- 
passes it, outraces it,—vcs the air, conscious 
of itself, conquering itself, ruling itself. 

Also, in the throat of the bird is riven the 
voice of the air. All that in the wind itself 
is weak, wild, useless in sweetness, is knit 
together in its song. As we may imagine 
the wild form of the cloud closed into the 
perfect form of the bird’s wings, so the wild. 
voice of the cloud into its ordercd and com- 


The Queen of the Air, 103 


rnanded voice; unwearied, rippling through 
the clear heaven in its gladness, interpreting 
all intense passion through the soft spring 
nights, bursting into acclaim and rapture of 
noir at daybreak, or lisping and twittering 
zmong the boughs and hedges through heat 
of day, like little winds that only make the 
cowslip bells shake, and ruffle the petals of 
the wild rose. 

66. Also, upon the plumes of the bird are 
Aut the colors of the air ; on these the gold 
uf the cloud, that cannot be gathered by any 
sovetousness ; the rubies of the clouds, that 
yre not the price of Athena, but are Athena ; 
the vermillion of the cloud-bar, and the 
fiame of the cloud-crest, and the snow of the 
<loud, and its shadow, and the melted blue 
bf the deep wells of the sky,—all these, 
seized by the creating spirit, and woven by 
Athena herself into films and threads of 
~lume ; with wave on wave following and 
'ading along breast, and throat, and opened 
. wings, infinite as the dividing of the foam 
and the sifting of the sea-sand; even the 
white down of the cloud seeming to flutter 
up between the stronger plumes,—seen, but 
too soft for touch. 


104 The Queen of the Air, 


And so the Spirit of the Air is put into, and 
upon, this created form; and it becomes, 
through twenty centuries, the symbol of 
divine help, descending, as the Fire, to speak 
but as the Dove, to bless. 

67. Next, in the serpent we approach the 
source of a group of myths, world-wide, 
founded on great and common human 
instincts, respecting which I must note one 
or two points which bear intimately on all 
our subject. ior 1f seems to me that the 
scholars who are at present occupied in 
interpretation of human myths have most of 
them forgotten that there are any such thing 
as natural myths, andthat thedark sayings 
of men may be both difficult to read, and 
not always worth reading, but the dark say- 
ings of nature will probably become clearer 
for the looking into, and will very cer- 
tainly be worth reading. And, indeed, all 
guidance to the right sense of the human and 
variable myths will probably depend on our 
first getting at the sense of the natural and 
invariable ones. The dead hieroglyph may 
have meant this or that; the living hiero- 
glyph means always the same; but remem- 
ber, it is just as much a hieroglyph as the 


The Queen of the Air. 105 


other; nay, more,—a ‘‘sacred or reserved 
sculpture,” a thing with an inner language. 
The serpent crest of the king’s crown, or of 
the god’s, on the pillars of Egypt, is a mys- 
tery, but the serpent itself, gliding past the 
pillar’s foot, is it less a mystery? Is there, 
indeed, no tongue, except the mute forked 
flash from its lips, in that running brook of 
horror on the ground? 

68. Why that horror? We all feel it, yet 
how imaginative it is, how disproportioned 
to the real strength of the creature! There 
is more poison in an ill-kept drain, ina pool 
of dish-washing at a cottage door, than in 
the deadliest asp of Nile. Every back yard 
which you look down into from the railway 
as it carries you out by Vauxhall or Dept- 
ford, holds its coiled serpent ; all the walls 
of those ghastly suburbs are enclosures of 
tank temples forserpent worship; yet you 
feel no horror in looking down into them 
as you would if yousaw the livid scales, and 
lifted head. There is more venom, mortal, 
inevitable, in a single word, sometimes, or 
in the gliding entranceof a wordless thought 
than ever ‘“‘vanti Libia con suarena.” But 
that horror is of the myth, not of the creat- 


206 The Queen of the Air. 


ure. There are myriads lower than this, and 
more loathsome, in the scale of being ; the 
links between dead matter and animation 
drift everywhere unseen. But it is the 
strength ofthe base element that isso dread- 
ful in the serpent; it is the very omnipo- 
tence of the earth. That rivulet of smooth 
silver, how does it flow, think you? It lit- 
erally rows on the earth, with every scale for 
an oar; it bites the dust with the ridges of 
its body. Watch it, when it moves slowly. 
A wave, but without wind! a current, but 
with no fall! all the body moving at the 
same instant, yet some of it to one side, 
some to another, orsome forward, and the 
rest of the coil backwards, but all with the 
same calm will and equal way, no contrac- 
tion, no extension ; one soundless, cause- 
less, march of sequent rings, and spectral - 
processions of spotted dust, with dissolution 
in its fangs, dislocation in its coils. Startle 
it, the winding stream will become atwisted 
arrow ; the wave of poisoned life will lash 
through the grass like a cast lance.* It 


* TI cannot understand this swift forward motion of 
serpents. The seizure of prey by the constrictor, though 
davisibly swift, is quite simple in mechanism; it is sim 


The Queen ot the Hit. 107 


scarcely breathes with its one lung (the 
other shrivelled and abortive) ; itis pass’ ve 
to the sun and shade, and is cold or hot 
ikea stone; yet ‘‘it can outclimb the 
monkey, outswim the fish, outleap the zebra, 
outwrestle the athlete, and crush the tiger.”* 
It is a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac 
power of the earth, of the entire earthly 
nature. As the bird is the clothed power of 
the air, so this is theclothed power of the 
dust ; as the bird the symbol of the spirit of 
life, so this of the grasp and sting of death. 

69. Hence the continual change in the 
interpretation put upon it in various relig- 


ply the return to its coil of an opened watch-spring, and 
is just as instantaneous. But the steady and contin- 
uous motion, without a visible fulcrum (for the whola 
body moves at the same instant, and I have often seen 
even small snakes glide as fast as I could walk), seema 
to involve a vibration of the scales quite too rapid to ba 
conceived. The motion of the crest and dorsal fin of 
the hippocampus, which is one of the intermediate types 
between serpent and fish, perhaps gives some resems 
blance of it, dimly visible, for the quivering turns tha 
fin into a mere mist. The entrance of the two barbs of 
abee’s sting by alternate motion, “the teeth of one 
barb acting as a fulcrum for the other,” must be somes 
thing like the serpent motion on a small scale, 

. * Richard Owen. 


108 The Queen of the Afr. 


ions. As the worm of corruption, it is the 
mightiest of all adversaries of the gods—the 
special adversary of their light and creative 
power—Python against Apollo. As the 
power of the earth against the air, the giants 
are serpent-bodied in the Gigantomachia ; 
but as the power of the earth upon the seed— 
consuming it into new life (‘‘ that which thou 
sowest is not quickened except it die ”)—-ser- 
pents sustain the chariot of the spirit of 
agriculture. 

70. Yet on the other hand, there is a 
power in the earth to take away corruption, 
and to purify (hence the very fact cf burial, 
and many uses of earth, only lately known) : 
nd in this sense the serpent is a heal- 
Ing spirit,—the representative of A‘scula- 
pius, and of Hygieia; and is a sacred earth- 
type in the temple of the Dew, being there 
especially asymbol of the native earth of 
Athens ; so that its departure from the tem- 
ple was a sign to the Athenians that they 
were toleave theirhomes. And then, lastly, 
as there is a strength and healing in the 
earth, no less than the strength of air, so 
there is conceived to be a wisdom of earth 
no less than a wisdom of the spirit; and 


The Queen of the Air. - 109 


when its deadly power is killed, its guiding 
power becomes true; so that the Python 
serpent is killed at Delphi, where yct the 
oracle is from the breath of the earth. 

71, You must remember, however, that 
in this, as in every other instance, I take 
emmy theatits) central time. This is only 
the meaning of the serpent to the Greek 
mind which could conccive an Athena. Its. 
first meaning to the nascent eyes cf men, 
and its continued influence over degraded 
Tacesco are subjects, of the most fearful 
mystery, Mr. Fergusson has just collected 
the principal evidence bearing on the matter 
in a work of very great value, andif you 
read his opening chapters, they will put you 
in possession of the circumstances needing 
chiefly to be considered. I cannot touch 
upon any of ther here, except only to point 
out that, though the doctrine of the so-called. 
‘‘corruption of human nature,” asserting 
that there is nothing but evil in humanity, 
is just as blasphemous and false as a doc- 
trine of the corruption of physical nature 
would be, asserting there was nothing but 
evil in the earth,—there is yet the clearest 
evidence of a disease, plague, or cretine 


TIO The Queen of the Zir. 


ous imperfection of development, hitherta 
allowed to prevail against the greater part 
of the races of men; and this in monstrous 
ways, more fullofmystery than the serpent- 
being itself. I have gathered for you to- 
night only instances of what is beautiful in 
Greek religion; but even in its best time 
«here were deep corruptions in other phases 
of it, and degraded forms of many of its 
deities, all originating in a misunderstood 
worship of the principle of life ; while in the 
religions of lower races, little less than 
these corrupted forms of devotion can be 
found, all having a strange and dreadful 
consistency with each other, and infecting 
Christianity, even at its strongest periods, 
with fatal terror of doctrine, and ghasiliness 
of symbolic conception, passing through 
fear into frenzied grotesquc, and thence into 
sensuality. 

In the Psalter of St. Louis itself, half of 
its letters are twisted snakes; there is 
scarcely a wreathed ornament, employed 
in Christian dress, or architecture, which 
cannot be traced back to the serpent’s coil; 
and there is rarely a piece of monkish 
decorated writing in the world that is not 


The Queen of the Air. PixT 


tainted with some ill-meant vileness of gro- 
tesquc,—nay, the very leaves of the twisted 
ivy-pattern of the fourteenth century can be 
followed back to wreaths for the foreheads 
of bacchanalian gods. And truly, it seems 
to me, as I gather in my mind the evidences 
of insane religion, degraded art, merciless 
war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure, and 
vain or vile hope, in which the nations of 
the world have lived since first they could 
bear record of themselves—it seems to me, 
I say, as if the race itself were still half 
- serpent) not extricated yet from its clay; a 
lacertine breed of bitterness—the glory of it 
emaciate with cruel hunger, and blotted 
with venomous stain; and the track of it, 
on the leaf a glittering slime, and in the 
sand a useless furrow. 

72. where are no myths, therefore, by- 
which the moral state and fineness of intel- 
ligence of different races can be so deeply 
tried or measured, as by those of the ser- 
pent and the bird ; both of them having an 
especial relation to the kind of remorse for 
sin, or for grief in fate, of which the national 
minds that spoke by them had been capa- 
ble. The serpent and vulture are alike 


412 The Queen of the Hir, 


emblems of immortality and purification 
among races which desired to be immortal 
and pure; and as they recognize their own 
misery, the serpent becomes to them the 
scourge of the Iuries, and the vulture finds 
its eternal prey in their breast. The bird 
long contests among the E¢yptians with the 
still received serpent symbolofpower. But 
the Draconian image of evil is established in 
the serpent Apap; while the bird’s wings, 
with the globe, become part of a better 
symbol of deity, and the entirc form of the 
vulture, as an emblem of purification, is 
associated with the earliest conception of 
Athena. In the type of the dove with the 
olive branch, the conception of the spirit of 
Athena in renewed life prevailing over ruin is 
embodied for the whole of futurity; while the 
Greeks, to whom, in a happier climate and 
higher life than that of Egypt, the vulture 
symbol of cleansing became unintelligible, 
took the eagle instead for their hieroglyph 
of supreme spiritual energy, and it thence- 
forward retains its hold on the human imag- 
ination, till it is established among Christian 
myths as the expression of the most exalted 
form of evangelistic teaching, The special 


Tbe Queen of the Air, 113 


relation of Athena to her favorite bird we will 
trace presently ; the peacock of Hera, and 
dove of Aphrodite, are comparatively unim- 
portant myths ; but the bird power is soon 
made entirely human by the Greeks in their 
flying angel of victory (partially human, 
with modified meaning of evil, in the Harpy 
and Siren) ; and thenceforward it associates 
itself with the Hebrew cherubim, and has 
had the most singular influence on the 
Christian religion by giving its wings tua 
render the conception of angels mysterious 
and untenable, and check rational endeavor 
to determine the nature of subordinate 
Spiritual agency ; while yet it has given to 
that agency a vague poetical influence of 
the highest value in its own imaginative 
way. 

73. But with the early serpent-worship 
there was associated another, that of the 
groves, of which you will also find the 
evidence exhaustively collected in Mr. Fer- 
gusson’s work. This tree-worship may 
have taken a dark form when associated 
with the Draconian one; or opposed, as in 
Judea, to a purer faith; but in itself, I be- 
eis it was always healthy, and though it 


114 The Queen of the Air. 


retains little definite hieroglyphic power in 
subsequent religion, it becomes, instead of 
symbolic, real; the flowers and trees are 
themselves beheld and beloved with a half- 
worshipping delight, which is always noble 
and healthful. 

And it is among the most notable indica- 
tions of the volition of the animating power 
that we find the ethical signs of good and 
evil set on these also, as well as upon 
animals; the venom of the serpent, and 
in some respects its image also, being asso- 
ciated even with the passionless growth of 
the leaf out of the ground; while the dis- 
tinctions of species seem appointed with 
more definite ethical address to the intelli- 
gence of man as their material products be- 
come more useful to him. 

74. I can easily show this, and, at the 
same time, make clear the relation to other 
plants of the flowers which especially belong 
to Athena, by examining the natural myths 
in the groups of the plants which would be 
used at any country dinner, over which 
Athena would, in her simplest household au- 
thority, cheerfully rule here in England. 
Suppose Horace’s favorite dish of beans, 


The Queen of the Hit. 11g 


with the bacon; potatoes; some savory 
stuffing of onions and herbs, with the meat ; 
celery, and a radish or two, with the cheese ; 
nuts and apples for dessert, and brown bread. 

yoaeune beans ‘are, from earliest’ time, 
the most important and interesting of the 
seeds of the great tribe of plants from which 
came the Latin and I'rench name for all 
kitchen vegetables, —things that are gathered 
with the hand—podded seeds that cannot 
be reaped, or beaten, or shaken down, but 
must be gathered green. ‘‘ Leguminous” 
plants, all of them having flowers like butter- 
flies, seeds in (frequently pendent) pods,— 
“‘letum siliqua quassante legumen ”— 
smooth and tender leaves, divided into 
many minor ones; strange adjuncts of ten- 
dril, for climbing (and sometimes of thorn) ; 
exquisitely sweet, yct pure scents of blos- 
som, and almost always harmless, if not 
serviceable seeds. It is of all tribes of 
plants the most definite, its blossoms being 
entirely limited in their parts, and not pass- 
ing into other forms. It is also the most 
usefully extended in range and scale ; famil- 
jar in the height of the forest—acacia, labur- 
bum, Jucas-tree ; familiar in the sown field 


116 The Queen of the Air. 


—bean and vetch and pea; familiar in the 
pasture—in every form of clustered clover 
and sweet trefoil tracery ; the most entirely 
serviceable and human of all orders of 
plants. 

76.. Next, in the potato, we have -the 
scarcely innocent underground stem of one 
ofa tribe set aside for evil ; having the deadly 
nightshade for its queen, and including the 
henbane, the witch’s mandrake, and the 
worst natural curse of modern civilization— 
tobacco.* And the strange thing about this 
tribe is, that though thus set aside for evil, 
they are not a group distinctly separate from 
those that are happier in function. There 
is nothing in other tribes of plants like the 
form of the bean blossom; bet there is 
another family with forms and structure 
closely connected with this venomous one. 
Examine the purple and yellow bloom of 
the common hedge nightshade; you will 
find it constructed exactly like some of the 
forms of the cyclamen; and, getting this 
clue, you will find at last the whole poison- 


* It is not easy to estimate the demoralizing effect 
on the youth of Europe of the cigar, in enabling them 
to pass their time happily in idleness, 


The Queen of the Air. 117 


ous and terrible group to be—sisters of the 
primulas ! 

The nightshades are, in fact, primroses 
with a curse upon them; and a sign set in 
their petals, by which the deadly and con- 
demned flowers may always be known from 
the innocent ones,—that the stamens of the 
nightshades are between the lobes, and of 
the primulas, opposite the lobes, of the 
corolla. 

VjeeNexGeciae by ‘side, in. the celery and 
radish, you have the two great groups of 
unbelled and cruciferous plants; alike in 
conditions of rank among herbs: both 
flowering in clusters; but the unbelled 
group, flat, the crucifers, in spires: both of 
them mean and poor in the blossom, and 
losing what beauty they have by too close 
crowding; both of them having the most 
curious influence on human character in the 
temperate zones of the earth, from the days 
of the parsley crown, and hemlock drink, 
and mocked Euripidean chervil, until now; 
but chiefly among the northern nations, 
being especially plants that are of some 
humble beauty, and (the crucifers) of endiass 
use, when they are chosen and cultivaced 


r18 The Queen of the Air. 


but that run to wild waste, and are the signg 
of neglected ground, in their rank or ragged 
leaves and meagre stalks, and pursed or 
podded seed clusters. Capable, even under 
cultivation, of no perfect beauty, though 
reaching some subdued delightfulness in the 
lady’s smock and the wallflower; for the 
most part they have every floral quality 
meanly, and in vain,—they are white with- 
out purity; golden, without preciousness ; 
redundant, without richness; divided, with- 
out fineness; massive, without strength ; 
and slender, without grace. Yet think over 
that useful vulgarity of theirs; and of the 
relations of German and English peasant 
character to its food of kraut and cabbage 
(as of Arab character to its food of palm- 
fruit), and you will begin to feel what pur- 
poses of the forming spirit are in these dis- 
tinctions of sp~cies. 

78, Next we take the nuts and apples,— 
the nuts representing one of the groups 
of catkined trees, whose blossoms are only 
tufts and dust ; and the other, the rose tribe, 
in which fruit and flower alike have been 
the types to the highest races of men, of all 
passionate temptation, or pure delight, from 


The Queen of the Air. 11g 


the coveting of Eve to the crowning of the 
Madonna, above the 


“ Rosa sempiterna, , 
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole ' 
Odor di lode al Sol.” 


We have no time now for these, we must go 
on to the humblest group ofall, yet the most. 
wonderful, that of the grass which has given. 
us our bread ; and from that we will go back. 
to the herbs. 

79. The vast family of plants which, 
under rain, make the earth green for man, 
and, under sunshine, give him bread, and, 
in their springing in the early year, mixed. 
with their native flowers, have given us (far 
more than the new leaves of trees) the: 
thought and word of ‘‘spring,” divide them- 
selves broadly into three great groups—the 
grasses, sedges, and rushes. ‘The grasses. 
are essentially a clothing for healthy and 
pure ground, watered by occasional rain, 
but in itself dry, and fit for all cultivated: 
pasture and corn. They are distinctively 
plants with round and jointed stems, which 
have long green flexible leaves, and heads. 


4120 The Queen of the Air. 


of seed, independently emerging from 
them. The sedges are essentially the cloths 
ing of waste and more or less poor or uncul- 
tivated soils, coarse in their structure, fre- 
quently triangular in stem—hence called 
‘‘acute” by Virgil—and with their heads of 
seed not extricated from theirleaves. Now, 
in both the sedges and grasses, the blossom 
has a common structure, though un- 
developed in the sedges, but composed 
always of groups of double husks, which 
have mostly a spinous process in the centre, 
sometimes projecting into a long awn of 
beard ; this central process being character- 
istic also of the ordinary leaves of mosses, 
as if a moss were a kind of ear of corn made 
permanently green on the ground, and with 
anew and distinct fructification. But the 
rushes differ wholly from the sedge and 
grass in their blossom structure. It is not 
a dual cluster, but a twice threefold one, so 
far separate from the grasses, and so closely 
connected with a higher order of plants, that 
I think you will find it convenient to group 
the rushes at once with that higher order, to 
which, if you will for the present let me give 
the general name of Drosidz, or dew-plants, 


Ube Queen of the Air. 12t 


it wil! enable me to say what I have to say 
of them much more shortly and clearly. 

80. These Drosidz, then, are plants de- 
lighting in interrupted moisture—moisture 
which comes either partially or at certain 
seasons—into dry ground. They are not 
water-plants, but the signs of water resting 
among dry places. Many of the true water- 
plants have triple blossoms, with a small 
triple calyx holding them; in the Drosidze 
the floral spirit passes into the calyx also, 
and the entire flower becomes a six-rayed 
star, bursting out of the stem laterally, as if 
it were the first of flowers and had made its 
way to the light by force through the unwill- 
ing green. They are often required to re- 
tain moisture or nourishment for the future 
blossom through long times of drought ; and 
this they do in bulbs under ground, of which 
some become a rude and simple, but most 
wholesome, food for man. 

81. So, now, observe, you are to divide 
the whole family of the herbs of the field 
into three great groups, —Droside, Carices,* 


* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than 
Cyperus for the generic name, being the Vergilian 
word, and representing a larger sub-species, 


422 The Queen of the Air. 


Graminez,—dew-plants, sedges, and grasses, 
Then the Drosidz are divided into five great 
orders: J” ics, asphodels, amaryllids, irids, 
and rushes. No tribes of flowers have had 
so great, so varied, or so healthy an influ- 
ence on man as this great group of Droside, 
depending, not so much on the whiteness 
of some of their blossoms, or the radiance 
of others, as on the strength and delicacy 
of the substance of their petals; enabling 
them to take forms of faultless elastic curva- 
ture, either in cups, as the crocus, or expand- 
ing bells, as the true lily, or heath-like bells, 
as the hyacinth, or bright and perfect stars, 
like the star of Bethlehem, or, when they 
are affected by the strange reflex of the ser- 
pent nature which forms the labiate group 
of all flowers, closing into forms of exqui- 
sitely fantastic symmetry in the gladiolus. 
Put by their side their Nereid sisters, the 
water-lilies, and you have in them the ori- 
gin of the loveliest forms of ornamental de- 
sign, and the most powerful floral myths 
yet recognized among human spirits, born 
‘by the streams of Ganges, Nile, Arno, and 
Avon. 

&2, For consider a little what each of 


Tbe Queen of the Air, 123 


those five tribes * has been to the spirit of 
man. First, in their nobleness, the lilies 
gave the lily of the Annunciation; the as- 
phodels, the flower of the Elysian fields ; the 
irids, the fleur-de-lys of chivalry ; and the 
amaryllids, Christ’s lily of the field; while 
the rush, trodden always under foot, became 
the emblem of humility. Then take each 
of the tribes, and consider the extent of their 
Jowcrinfluence. Perdita’s ‘‘ The crown im- 
perial, lilies of all kinds,” are the first tribe, 
which, giving the type of perfect purity in 
the Madonna’s lily, have, by their lovely 
form, influenced the entire decorative design 
of Italian sacred art; while ornament of war 
was continually enriched by the curves of 
the triple petals of the Florentine ‘‘ giglio,” 
and French fleur-de-lys ; so that it is impos- 
sible to count their influence for good in the 
middleages, partly as a symbol of womanly 
character, and partly of the utmost bright- 

* Take this rough distinction of the four tribes : lilies, 
superior ovary, white seeds ; asphodels, superior ovary, 
black seeds; irids, inferior ovary, style (typically) 
rising into central crest; amaryllids, inferior ovary, 
stamens (typically) joined in central cup. Then the 
rushes are a dark group, through which they stoop te 


the grasses, 


124 The Queen of the Air. 


ness and refinement of chivalry in the city 
which was the flower of cities. 

Afterwards, the group of the turban-lilies, 
or tulips, did some mischief (their splendid 
stains having made them the favorite caprice 
of florists) ; but they may be pardoned all 
such guilt for the pleasure thcy have given 
in cottage gardens, and are yet to give, 
when lowly life may again be possible 
among us; and the crimson bars of the 
tulips in their trim beds, with their likeness 
in crimson bars of morning above them, 
and its dew glittering heavy, globed in 
their glossy cups, may be loved better than. 
the gray nettles of the ash heap, under 
gray sky, unveined by vermilion or by gold. 

83. The next great group, of the aspho- 
dels, divides itself also into two principal 
families : one, in which the flowers are like 
stars, and clustered characteristically in 
balls, though opening sometimes into looser 
heads ; and the other, in which the flowers 
are in long bells, opening suddenly at the 
lips,and clustered in spires on a long stem, or 
drooping from it, when bent by their weight. 

The star-group, of the squills, garlics, and 
onions, has always caused me great wonder. 


The Queen of the Air. 128 


I cannot understand why its beauty, and 
serviceableness, should have been associated 
with the rank scent which has been really 
among the most powerful means of degrad- 
ing peasant life, and separating it from that 
of the higher classes. 

The belled group, of the hyacinth and 
convallaria, is as delicate as the other is 
coarse; the unspeakable azure light along 
the ground of the wood hyacinth in English 
spring ; the grape hyacinth, which is in south 
France, as if a cluster of grapes and a hive 
of honey had been distilled and compressed 
together into one small boss cf celled and 
beaded blue? “he lilies of the valley every- 
where, in each sweet and wild recess of 
rocky lands,—count the influences of these 
on childish and innocent life ; then measure 
the mythic power of the hyacinth and as- 
phodel as connected with Greek thoughts of 
immortality ; finally take their useful and 
nourishing power in ancient and modern 
peasant life, and it will be strange if you do 
not feel what fixed relation exists between 
the agency of the creating spirit in these, 
and in us who live by them. 

84. It is impossible to bring inte any 


126 The Queen of the Afr.” 


tenable compass for our present purpose, 
even hints of the human influence of the two 
remaining orders of Amaryllids and Irids 3 
only note this generally, that while these in 
northern countries share with the Primulas 
the fields of spring, it seems that in Greece, 
the primulacez are not an extended tribe, 
while the crocus, narcissus, and Amaryllis 
lutea, the ‘‘lily of the field” (I suspect also 
that the flower whose name we translate 
“violet” was in truth an iris) represented 
to the Greek the first coming of the breath 
of life on the renewed herbage ; and became 
in his thoughts the true embroidery of the 
saffron robe of Athena. Later in the year, 
the dianthus (which, though belonging to 
an entirely different race of plants, has yet 
a strange look of having been made out of 
the grasses by turning the sheath-membrane 
at the root of their leaves into a flower) 
seems to scatter, in multitudinous families, 
its crimson stars far and wide. But the 
golden lily and crocus, together with the 
asphodel, retain always the old Greek’s 
fondest thoughts,—they are only ‘‘ golden” 
flowers that are to burn on the trees, and. 
float on the streams of paradise. 


Tbe Queen of the Air. 127 


35. I have but one tribe of plants more to 
note at our country feast—the savory herbs ; 
but must go a little out of my way to come 
at them rightly. All flowers whose petals 
are fastened together, and most of those 
whose petals are loose, are best thought of 
first as a kind of cup or tube opening at 
the mouth. Sometimes the opening is grad- 
ual, as in the convolvulus or campanula; 
oftener there is a distinct change of direction 
between the tube and expanding lip, as in 
the primrose ; or even a contraction under 
the lip, making the tube into a narrow- 
necked phial or vase, as in the heaths; 
but the general idea of a tube expanding 
into a quatrefoil, cinquefoil, or sixfoil, will 
embrace most of the forms. 

86. Now, it is easy to conceive that 
flowers of this kind, growing in close clus- 
ters, may, in process of time, have extended 
their outside petals rather than the interior 
ones (as the outer flowers of the clusters of 
many umbellifers actually do), and thus 
elongated and variously distorted forms 
have established themselves; then if the 
stalk is attached ta the side instead of the 
base of thetube, its base becomes a spur, 


428 The Queen of the Air. 


and thus all the grotesque forms of the mints, 
violets, and larkspurs, gradually might be 
composed. But, however this may be, 
there is one great tribe of plants separate 
from the rest, and of which the influence 
seems shed upon the rest, in different degrees ; 
and these would give the impression, not 
so much of having been developed by 
change, as of being stamped with a char- 
acter of their own, more or less serpen- 
tine or dragon-like. And I think you will 
find it convenient to call these generally 
Draconide ; disregarding their present ugly 
botanical name which I do not care even to 
write once—you may take for their princi- 
pal types the foxglove, snapdragon, and 
calceolaria ; and you will find they all agree 
in a tendency to decorate themselves by 
spots, and with bosses or swollen places in 
their leaves, as if they had been touched by 
poison. The spot of the foxglove is espe- 
cially strange, because it draws the color out 
of the tissue all around it, asif it had been 
stung, and as if the central color was really 
an inflamed spot, with paleness round, 
Then also they carry to its extreme the dec- 
Oration by bulging or pouting the petal-— 


The Queen of the Air. 12; 


often beautifully used by other flowers in 
a minor degree, like the beating out of 
bosses in hollow silver, as in the kalmia, 
beaten out apparently in each petal by the 
stamens inst-ad ofa hammer ; or the borage, 
pouting towards ; but the snapdragons and 
calceolarias carry it to its extreme. 

87. Then the spirit of these Draconidz 
seems to pass more or less into other flowers, 
whose forms are properly pure vases ; but 
it affects some of them slizhtly, others not 
atall. It never strongly affects the heaths ; 
never once the roses ; but it enters like an 
evil spirit into the buttercup, and turns it in- ~ 
to alarkspur, witha black, spotted, grotesque 
centre, and astrange, broken blue, gorgeous 
and intense, yct impure, glittering on the 
surface as if it were strewn with broken 
glass, and stained or darkening irregularly 
intored. Andthen at last the serpent charm 
changes the ranunculus into monkshood, and 
makes it poisonous. It enters into the for- 
get-me-not, and the star of heavenly tur- 
quoise is corrupted into the viper’s bugloss, 
darkened with the same strange red as the 
Jarkspur, and fretted into a fringe of thorn ; 
it enters, together with a strange insects 

bee 


130 The Queen of the Afr. 


spisit, into the asphodels, and (though with 
a greater interval between the groups) they 
change into spotted orchidee ; it touches the 
poppy, it becomes a fumaria ; the iris, and 
it pouts into a gladiolus; the lily, and it 
chequers itself into a snake’s-head, and 
secretes in the deep of its bell, drops, not of 
venom indeed, but honey-dew, as if it were 
a healing serpent. For there is an A®scula- 
pian as well as an evil serpentry among the 
Draconide, and the fairest of them, the “ erba 
della Madonna” of Venice (Linaria Cymba- 
laria), descends from the ruins it delights 
into the herbage at their feet, and touches it ; 
and behold, instantly, a vast group of herbs 
for healing,—all draconid in form,—spotted 
and crested, and from their lip-like corollas 
named ‘“‘labiate;” full of various balm, 
and warm strength for healing, yet all of 
them without splendid honor or perfect 
beauty, ‘‘ ground ives,” richest when crushed 
ender the foot; the best sweetness and 
gentle brightness of the robes of the field, — 
thyme, and marjoram, and Euphrasy. 

88. And observe, again and again, with 
respect to all these divisions and powers of 
plants: it does not matter in the least by 


The Queen of the Afr. 13t 


what concurrences of circumstance or neces- 
sity they may gradually have been devel- 
oped ; the concurrence of circumstance is 
itself the supreme and inexplicable fact. We 
always come at last to a formative cause, 
which directs the circumstance, and mode 
of meeting it. If you ask an ordinary bot- 
anist the reason of the form of aleaf, he 
will tell you itisa ‘‘developed tubercle,” 
and that its ultimate form ‘‘is owing to the 
directions of its vascular threads.” But what 
directs its vascular threads? ‘‘They are 
seeking forsomething they want,” he will 
probably answer. What made them want 
that? What made them seek for it thus? 
Seek for it, in five fibres orin three? Seck 
for it, in serration, or in sweeping curves? 
Seek for it, in servile tendrils, or impetuous 
spray? Seek for it, in woollen wrinkles 
rough w7.th stings, or in glossy surfaces, 
green with pure strength, and winterless 
delight ? 

89. There is no answer. But the sum of 
allis that over the entire surface of the earth, 
and its waters, as influenced by the power 
of the air under solar light, there is devei- 
oped a series of changing forms, in clouds, 


132 The Queen of the Air. 


plants, and animals, all of which have refer. 
ence in theiraction, or nature, to the human 
intelligence that perceives them; and on 
which, in their aspects of horror and beauty, 
and their qualities of good and evil, there is 
engraved a series of myths, or words of the 
forming power, which, according to the true 
passion and energy of the human race, they 
have been enabled to read into religion. 
And this forming power has been by allna- 
tions partly confused with the breath or air 
through which itacts, and partly understood 
asa creative wisdom, proceeding from the Su- 
preme Deity ; but entering into and inspiring 
all intelligences that work in harmony with 
Him, And whatever intellectual results 
may be in modern days obtained by regard- 
ing this effluence only as a motion of vibra- 
tion, every formative human art hitherto, 
and the best states of human happiness and 
order, have depended on the apprehension 
of its mystery (which is certain), and of its 
personality, which is probable. 

go. Of its influence on the formative arts, 
I have a few words to say separately : my 
present business is only to interpret, as we 
are now sufficiently enabled to do, the exter 


The Queen of the Air. 13? 


nal symbols of the myth under which it was 
represented by the Greeks asa goddess of 
counsel, taken first into the breast of their — 
supreme Deity, then created out of his 
thoughts, and abiding closely beside him ; 
always sharing and consummating his 
power. 
gt. And in doing this we have first to note 
the meaning of the principal epithet applied 
to Athena, ‘‘Glaukopis,” ‘‘ with eyes full of 
light,” the first syllable being connected, by 
its root, with words signifying sight, not 
with words signifying color. As far as I 
can trace the color perception of the Greeks, 
I find it all founded primarily on the degree 
of connection between color and light; the 
most important fact to them in the color of 
red being its connection with fire and sun- 
shine; so that ‘‘ purple” is, in its original 
sense, ‘‘ fire-color,” and the scarlet or orange, 
of dawn, more than any other fire-color. I 
was long puzzled by Homer’s calling the sea 
* purple ; and misled into thinking he meant 
the color of cloud shadows on green sea; 
whereas he really means the gleaming blaze 
of the waves under wide light. Aristotle’s 
idea (partly true) is that light, subdued by 


334 The Queen of the Rir. 


blackness, becomes red; and blackness, 
heated or lighted, also becomes red. ‘Thus, 
a color may be called purple becaus- it is 
light subdued (and so death is called 
‘‘purple” or ‘‘shadowy ” death) ; or else it 
may be called purple as being shade kindled 
with fire, and thus said of the lighted sea ; 
or even of the sun itself, when it is thought 
of as a red luminary opposed to the white- 
ness of the moon: ‘‘purpureos inter soles, 
et candida lune sidera ;” or of golden hair: 
‘‘pro purpureo pcenam solvens scelerata 
capillo ;” while both ideas are modified by 
the influence of an earlier form of the word, 
which has nothing to do with fire at all, but 
only with mixing or staining ; and then, to 
make the whole group of thoughts inextri- 
cably complex, yet rich and subtle in pro- 
portion to their intricacy, the various rose 
and crimson colors of the murex-dye,—the 
crimson and purple of the poppy, and fruit 
of the palm,—and the association ofall these 
with the hue of blood,—partly direct, partly 
through a confusion between the word signi- 
fying ‘‘slaughter” and ‘‘palm-fruit color,” 
mingle themselves in, and renew the whole 
mature of the old word; so that, in later 


Tbe Queen of the Air. 135 


literature, it means a different color, or emo- 
tion of color, in almost every place where it 
occurs ; and casts forever around the reflec- 
tion of all that has been dipped in its 
dyes. 

92. So that the world is really a liquid 
prism, and stream ofopal. And then, last 
of all, to keep the whole history of it in the 
fantastic course of a dream, warped here 
and there into wild grotesque, we moderns, 
who have preferred to rule over coal-mines 
instead of the sea (and so have turned the 
everlasting lamp of Athena into a Davy’s 
safety-lamp in the hand of Britannia, and 
Athenian heavenly lightning into British 
subterranean ‘‘damp”), have actually got 
our purple out of coal instead of the sea! 
And thus, grotesquely, we have had enforced 
on us the doubt that held the old word be- 
tween blackness and fire, and have com- 
pleted the shadow, and the fear of it, by giv- 
ing it a name from battle, ‘‘ Magenta.” 

93. There is precisely a similar confusion 
between light and color in the word used for 
the blue of ‘the eyes of Athena—a noble 
confusion, however, brought about by the 
intensity of the Greek sense that the heaven 


136 The Queen of the Air. 


is light, more than it is blue. I was not 
thinking of this when I wrote in speaking of 
pictorial chiaroscuro, ‘‘ The sky is not blue 
color merely: it is blue fire and cannot be 
painted” (Mod. P. iv. p. 36); but it was 
this that the Greeks chiefly felt of it, and so 
‘‘Glaukopis ” chiefly means gray-eyed : gray 
standing for a pale or luminous blue; but it 
only means ‘‘ owl-eyed” in thought of the 
roundness and expansion, not from the ~ 
color; this ‘breath and brightness being, 
again, in their moral sense typical of the 
breadth, intensity, and singleness of the sight 
in prudence (‘‘if thine eye be single, thy 
whole body shall be full of ight”). Then 
the actual power of the bird to see in twilight 
enters into the type, and perhaps its general 
fineness of sense. ‘‘ Before the human form 
was adopted, her (Athena's) proper symbol 
was the owl, a bird which seems to surpass 
all other creatures in acuteness of organic 
perception, its eye being calculated to ob- 
serve objects which to all others are 
enveloped in darkness, its ear to hear 
sounds distinctly, and its nostrils to dis- 
criminate effluvia with such nicety that it has 
been deemed prophetic, from discovering 


The Queen of the Hir. 137 


the putridity of death even in the first stages 
of disease.” * 

I cannot find anywhere an account of the 
first known occurrence of the type; but, in 
the early ones on Attic coins, the wide round 
eyes are clearly the principal things to be 
made manifest. 

94. There is yet, however, another color 
of great importance in the conception of 
Athena—the dark blue of hcr egis. Justas 
the blue or gray of her eyes was conceived 
as more light than color, so her egis was 
dark blue, because the Greeks thought of 
this tint more as shade than color, and, while 
they used various materials in ornamenta- 
tion, lapisiazuli; carbonate of copper, or; 
perhaps, smalt, with real cnjoyment of the 
bluestint, it was: yet in their minds as 
distinctly representative of darkness as 
scarlet was of light, and, therefore, anything 
dark,+ but especially the color of heavy 

* Payne Knight in his “ Inquiry into the Symbolical 
Language of Ancient Art,’ not trustworthy, being little 
more than a mass of conjectural memoranda, but the 
heap is suggestive, if well sifted. 

t In the breastplate and shield of Atrides the serpents 


and bosses are all of this dark color, yet the serpents 
are said to be like rainbows; but through all this 


738 The Queen of the Hit. 


thunder-cloud, was described by the same 
term. The physical power of this darkness 


splendor and opposition of hue, I feel distinctly that 
the literal “splendor,” with its relative shade, are 
prevalent in the conception; and that there is always a 
tendency to look through the hue to its cause. And 
in this feeling about color the Greeks are separated 
_from the eastern nations, and from the best designers 
of Christian times. I cannot find that they take 
pleasure in color for its own sake; it may be in some- 
thing more than color, or better; but it is not in the 
hue itself. When Homer describes cloud breaking 
from a mountain summit, the crags become visible in 
light, notin color; he feels only their flashing out in 
bright edges and trenchant shadows; above, the 
“infinite,’’ “ unspeakable ”’ zether is torn open—but not 
the d/ue of itt He has scarcely any abstract pleasure 
in blue, or green, or gold; but only in their shade or 
flame. , 

I have yet to trace the causes of this (which will be 
a long task, belonging to art questions, not to mythologi- 
cal ones); but it is, I believe, much connected with the 
brooding of the shadow of death over the Greeks with- 
out any clear hope of immortality. The restriction of 
the color on their vases to dim red (or yellow) with 
black and white, is greatly conn:. 1 with their 
sepulchral use, and with all the melancholy of Greek 
tragic thought; and in this gloom the failure of color- 
perception is partly noble, partly base: noble, in its 
earnestness, which raises the design of Greek vases as 
far above tue Gesigning of mere colorist nations like 


i, Che Queen of the Hit. 139 


of the zgis, fringed with lightning, is given 
quite simply when Jupiter himself uses it to 
overshadow Ida and the Plain of Troy, and 
withdraws it at the prayer of Ajax for light ; 
and again when he grants it to be worn for 
a time by Apollo, whois hidden by its cloud 
when he strikes down Patroclus; but its 
spiritual power is chiefly expressed by a 
word signifying deeper shadow,—the gloom 
of Erebus, or of our evening, which, when 
spoken of the egis, signifies, not merely the 
indignation of Athena, but the entire hiding 
or withdrawal of her help, and beyond even 
this, her deadlicst of all hostility, —the dark- 


the Chinese, as men’s thoughts are above children’s; 
and yet it is partly base and earthly, and inherently 
defective in one human faculty; and I believe it was 
one cause of the perishing of their art so swiftly, 
for indeed there is no decline so sudden, or down to 
such utter loss and ludicrous depravity, as the fall of 
Greek design on its vases from the fifth to the third 
century B. ©. Onthe other hand, the pure colored- 
gift, when employed for pleasure only, degrades in an- 
other direction; so that among the Indians, Chinese, 
and Japanese, all intellectual progress in art has been 
forages rendered impossible by the prevalence of that 
faculty; and yet it is, as I have said again and again, 
the spiritual power of art ; and its true brightness is the 
essential characteristic of all healthy schools. 


140 The Queen of the Afr." 


ness by which she herself deceives and be- 
guiles to final ruin those to whom she is 
wholly adverse; this contradiction of her 
own glory being the uttermost judgment 
upon human falsehood. ‘Thus it is she who 
provokes Pandarus to the treachery which 
purposed to fulfil the rape of Helen by the 
murder of her husband in time of truce; 
and —zhen"-the * Greek king, Sholdine? his 
wounded brother’s hand, prophesies against 
Troy the darkness of the egis which shall 
be over all, and for ever.* 

g5. This, then, finally, was the perfect 
color-conception of Athena: the flesh, snow- 
white (the hands, feet, and face of marble, 
even when the statue was hewn roughly in 
wood); the eyes of keen pale blue, often in 
statues represented by jewels; the long robe 
to the feet; crocus-colored ; andthe eeis 
thrown over it of thunderous purple; the 
helmet golden Cl. v. 744), and I suppose 
its crest also, as that of Achilles. 

If you think carefully of the meaning and 
character which is now enough illustrated 
for you in each of these colors, and remem= 


® Cpemviy savyoow Cwoe—Il, iv. 166, 


The Queen of the Air. 141 


‘er that the crocus-color and the purple 
were both of them developments, in oppo- 
‘site directions, of the great central idea of 
fire-color, or scarlet, you will see that this 
form of the creative spirit of the earth is 
conceived as robed in the blue, and purple, 
and scarlet, the white, and the gold, which 
have been recognized for the sacred chords 
of colors, from the day when the cloud de- 
scended on a Rock more mighty than Ida. 

96. I have spoken throughout, hitherto, 
of the conception of Athena, as it is trace- 
able in the Greek mind; not as it was ren- 
dered by Greek art. It is matter of extreme 
difficulty, requiring a sympathy at once 
affectionate and cautious, and a knowledge 
reaching the earliest springs of the religion 
of many lands, to discern through the im- 
perfection, and,- alas! more dimly yet, 
through the triumphs of formative art, what 
kind of thoughts they were that appointed 
for it the tasks of its childhood, and watched 
by the awakening of its strength. 

The religious passion is nearly always 
vividest when the art is weakest; and the 
technical skill only reaches its deliberate 
splendor when the ecstasy which gave it 


t4ce The Queen of the Afr. 


birth has passed away forever. It is ag 
vain an attempt to reason out the visionary 
power or guiding influence of Athena in the 
Greek heart, from anything we now read, 
or possess, of the work of Phidias, as it 
would be for the disciples of some new relig- 
ion to infer the spirit of Christianity from 
Titian’s ‘‘Assumption.” The effective vi- 
tality of the religious conception can be 
traced only through the efforts of trembling 
hands, and strange pleasures of untaught 
eyes; and the beauty of the dream can no 
more be found in the first symbols by which _ 
it is expressed, than a child’s idea_of fairy- 
land can be gathered from its pencil scrawl, 
or a girl’s love for her broken doll explained 
by athe defaced sfeatures) = On @thes other 
hand, the Athena of Phidias was, in very 
fact, not so much the deity, as the darling 
of the Athenian people. Her magnificence 
represented their pride and fondness, more 
than their piety; and the great artist, in 
lavishing upon her dignities which might be 
ended abruptly by the pillage they provoked, 
resigned, apparently without regret, theawe 
of her ancient memory ; and (with only the 
careless remonstrance of a workman too 


The Queen of the Afr. 143 


strong to be proud) even the perfectness of 
his own art. Rejoicing in the protection 
of their goddess, and in their own hour of 
glory, the people of Athena robed her, at 
their will, with the preciousness of ivory and 
gems ; forgot or denied the darkness of the 
breastplate of judgment, and vainly bade 
its unappeasable serpents relax their coils in 
gold. 

97. It will take me many a day yet—if 
days, many or few, are given me—to disen- 
tangle in anywise the proud and practiced 
disguises cf religious creeds from the in- 
stinctive arts which, grotesquely and indeco- 
rously, yet with sincerity, strove to embody 
them, orto relate. But I think the reader, 
by help even of the imperfect indications 
already given to him, will be able to follow, 
with a continually increasing security, the 
vestiges of the Myth of Athena; and to re- 
animate its almost evanescent shade, by 
connecting it with the now recognized facts 
of existent nature which it, more or less 
dimly, reflected and foretold. I gather these 
facts together in brief sum. 

98. The deep of air that surrounds the 
earth enters into union with the earth at its 


144 The Queen of the Air. 


surface, and withits waters, so as to be the 
apparent cause of their ascending into life. 
First, it warms them, and shades, at once, 
staying the heat of the sun’s rays in its own ~ 
body, but warding their force with its clouds. 
It warms and cools at once, with traffic of 
balm and frost; so that the white wreaths 
are withdrawn from the field of the Swiss 
peasant by the glow of Libyan rock. It 
gives its own strength to the sea; forms 
and fills every cell of its foam ; sustains the 
precipices, and designs the valleys of its 
Waves; gives the gleam to their moving 
under the night, and the white fire to their 
plains under sunrise ; lifts their voices along 
the rocks, bears above them the spray: of 
birds, pencils through them the dimpling of 
unfooted sands. It gathers out of them a 
portion in the hollow of its hand: dyes, 
with that, the hills into dark blue, and their 
glaciers with dying rose; inlays with that, 
for sapphire, the dome in which it has to 
set the cloud; shapes out of that the heav- 
enly flocks: divides them, numbers, cher- 
ishes, bears them on its bosom, calls them 
to their journeys, waits by their rest; feeds 
from them the brooks that cease not, and 


Tbe Queen of the Air. 145 


strews with them the dews that cease. It 
spins and weaves their fleece into wild tapes- 
try, rends it, and renews; and flits and 
flames, and whispers, among the golden 
threads, thrilling them with a plectrum of 
strange fire that traverses them to and fro, 
and is enclosed in them like life. 

It enters into the surface of the earth, sub- 
dues it, and falls together with it into fruit- 
ful dust, from which can be moulded flesh ; 
it joins itself, in dew, to the substance of 
adamant, and becomes the green leaf out of 
the dry ground ; it enters into the separated 
shapes of the earth it has tempered, com- 
mands the ebb and flow of the current of 
their life, fills their limbs with its own light- 
ness, measures their existence by its in- 
dwelling pulse, moulds upon their lips the 
words by which one soul can be known to 
another ; is to them the hearing of the ear, 
and the beating of the heart; and, passing 
away, leaves them to the peace that hears 
and moves no more. 

99. This was the Athena of the greatest 
people of the days of old. And opposite to 
the temple of this Spirit of the breath, and 
life-blood, of man and of beast, stood, on 

10 


146 The Queen of the Hir. 


the Mount of Justice, and near the chasm 
which was haunted by the goddess-Avengers, 
an altar to a God unknown,—proclaimed at 
~ last to them, as one who, indeed, gave to all 
men, life, and breath, and all things; and 
rain from heaven, filling their hearts with 
food and gladness ; a God who had made of 
one blood all nations of men who dwell on 
the face of allthe earth, and had determined 
the times of their fate, and the bounds of 
their habitation. 

100. We ourselves, fretted here in our 
narrow days, know less, perhaps, in very 
deed, than they, what manner of spirit we 
are of, or what manner of spirit we igno- 
rantly worship. Have we, indeed, desired the 
Desire of all nations? and will the Master 
whom we meant to seek, and the Messenger 
in whom we thought we delighted, confirm, 
when He comes to His temple,—or not 
find in its midst,—the tables heavy with gold 
for bread, and the seats that are bought 
with the price of the dove? Oris our own 
land also to be left by its angered Spirit, 
—left among those, whcre sunshine vainly 
' sweet, and passionate folly of storm, 
waste themselves in the silent places of 


The Queen of the Air. 147 


knowledge that nas passed away, and of 
tongues that have ceased? 

This only we may discern assuredly ; this, 
every true light of science, every merci- 
fully-granted power, every wisely-restricted 
thought, teach us more clearly day by day, 
that in the heavens above, and the earth 
beneath, there is one continual and omnipo- 
tent presence of help, and of peace, for all 
men who know that they live, and remem 
ber that they dic. 


548 Tbe Queen of the Air, 


IT. 


ATHENA ERGANE-* 
(Athena in the Heart.) 


WARIOUS NOTES RELATING TO THE CONCEPTION OF 
ATHENA AS THE DIRECTRESS OF THE IMAGINA=- 
TION AND WILL. 


101. J HavE now only a few words to say, 
bearing on what seems to me present need. 
respecting the third function of Athena, con- 
ceived as the directress of human passion, 
resolution, and labor. 

Few words, for lam not yet prepared to 
give accurate distinction between the intel- 
lectual ruleof Athena and that of the Muses ; 
but, broadly, the Muses, with their king, 
preside over meditative, historical, and 
pcetic arts, whose end is thediscovery of light 
or truth, and the creation of beauty ; but 


*“ Athena the worker, or having rule over work.” 
The name was first given to her by the Athenians, 


The Queen of the Air. 149 


Athena rules over moral passion, and practi- 
cally useful art. She does not make men 
learned, but prudent and subtle; she does 
not teach them to make their work beautiful, 
but to make it right. | 

In different places of my writings, and 
through many years of endeavor to define 
the laws of art, I have insisted on this right- 
ness in work, and on its connection with 
virtue of character, inso many partial ways, 
that the impression left on the reader’s mind— 
if, indeed, it was ever impressed at all—has 
been confused and uncertain. In beginning 
the series of my corrected works, I wish this 
principle (in my own mind the foundation 
of every other) to be made plain, if nothing 
else is; and will try, therefore, to make it 
so, as far as, by any effort, I can pi ‘t into 
unmistakable words. And, first, here is a 
very simple statement of it, given lately in 
a’lecture on the Architecture of the Valley 
of the Somme, which will be better read in 
this place than in its incidental connection 
with my account of the porches of Abbeville. 

102. I had used, in apreceding part ofthe 
lecture, the expression, ‘‘by what faults” 
this Gothic architecture fell. Wecontinually 


150 The Queen of the Hit. 


speak thus of works of art. We talk oftheir 
faults and merits, as of virtues and vices. 
What do we mean by talking of -he faults 
of a picture, or the merits of a piece ofstone? 
The faults of a work of art are the faults 
of its workman, and its virtues his virtues. 
Great art is the expression of the mind of 
a great man, and mean art, that of the want 
of mind of a weak man. A foolish person 
builds foolishly, and a wise one, sensibly ; 
a virtuous one, beautifully ; and a vicious 
one, basely. If stone work is well put to- 
gether, it means that a thouvhtful man 
planned it, and a careful man cut it, and an 
honest man cemented it. If it has too much 
ornament, it means that its carvcr was too 
greedy of pleasure ; iftoo little, that he was 
rude, or insensitive. or stupid, and the like. 
So that when once you have learned how to 
spell these most precious of all legends,— 
pictures and buildings,—you may read the 
characters of men, and of nations, in their 
art, as in amirror; nay, as in a microscope, 
and magnified a hundredfold; for the char- 
acter becomes passionate in the art, and in- 
tensifies itself in all its noblest or meanest 
delights, Nay, not only as in a microscope, 


The Queen of the Air. 15t 


but asundera scalpel, and in dissection ; for 
a man may hide himself from you, or mis- 
represent himself to you, every other way; 
but he cannot in his work: there, be sure, 
you have him to the inmost. All that he 
likes, all that he sees,—all that he can do, 
—his imagination, his affections, his per- 
severance, his impatience, his clumsiness, 
cleverness, everything is there. Ifthe work 
is a cobweb, you know it was made bya 
Spiden tied honey-comb, by a bee:) a 
wormeast is thrown up by a worm, and a 
nest wreathed by a bird; and a house built 
by a man, worthily, if he is worthy, and ig- 
nobly if he is ignoble. 

Andalways, fromthe least to the greatest, 
as the made thing is good or bad, so is the 
maker of it. 

103. You all use this faculty of judgment 
more or less, whether you theoretically ad- 
mit the principle or not. Take that floral 
gable; * you don’t suppose the man who 
built Stonehenge could have built that, or 


* The elaborate pendiment above the central porch 
at the west end of Rouen Cathedral, pierced intoa 
transparent web of tracery, and enriched with a border 
of “ twisted eglantine.” 


152 The Queen of the Air. 


that tne man who built that, would have 
built Stonehenge? Do you think an old 
Roman would have liked such a piece of fili- 
gree work? or that Michael Angelo would 
have spent his time in twisting these stems 
of roses in and out? Or, of modern handi- 
craftsmen, do youthinka burglar, ora brute, 
ora pickpocket could have carvedit? Could 
Bill Sykes have doneit? or the Dodger, dex- 
terous with finger and tool? You will find 
in the end, that zo man could have done it but 
exacily the man who did it; and by looking 
close at it,you may,if you know your letters, 
read precisely the manner of man he was. 

104. Now I must insist on this matter, for 
a grave reason. Of all facts concerning art, 
this is the one most necessary to be known, 
that, while manufacture is the work of hands 
only, art is the work of the whole spirit of 
man ; and as that spirit is, so is the deed of 
it; and by whatever power of vice or virtue 
any art is produced, thesame vice or virtue 
it reproduces and teaches. That which is 
born of evil begets evil; and that which is 
born of valor and honor, teaches valor and 
honor. All art is either infection or educa- 
tion. It mus be one or other of these. 


Ube Queen of the Air. 153 


105. This, I repeat, ofall truths respecting 
art, is the one of which understanding is the 
most precious, and denial the most deadly. 
And I assert it the more, because it has of 
late been repeatedly, expressly, and with 
contumely, denied, and that by high author- 
ity ; and I hold it one of the most sorrowful 
facts connected with the decline of the arts 
among us, that English gentlemen, of high 
standing asscholars and artists, should have 
been blinded into the acceptance, and be- 
trayed into the assertion ofa fallacy which 
only authority such as theirs could have ren- 
dered for an instant credible. For the con- 
trary of itis written in the history of all 
great nations ; it is the onesentence always 
inscribed on the steps of their thrones ; the 
one concordant voice in which they speak to 
us out of their dust. 

All such nations first manifest themselves 
as a pure and beautiful animal race, with 
intense energy and imagination. They live 
lives of hardship by choice, and by grand 
instinct of manly discipline; they become 
fierce and irresistible soldiers ; the nation is 
always its own army, and their king, or chief 
head of government, is always their first 


154 The Queen of the Air. 


soldier. Pharaoh, or David, or Leonidas, or 
Valerius, or Barbarossa, or Coeur de Lion, or 
St. Louis, or Dandolo, or Frederick the Great, 
—Egyptian, Jew, Greek, Roman, German, 
English, French, Venetian,—that is invio- 
lable law for them all; their king must be 
their first soldier, or they cannot be in pro- 
gressive power. Then, after their great 
military period, comes the domestic period ; 
in which, without betraying the discipline of 
war, they add to their great soldiership the 
delights and possessions of a delicate and 
tender home-life ; and then, for all nations, 
is the time of their perfect art, which is the 
fruit, the evidence, the reward of their 
national ideal of character, developed by the 
finished care of tac occupations of peace. 
That is the history of all true art that ever 
was, or can be; palpably the history of it,— 
unmistakably,—written on the forehead of 
it in letters of light,—in tongues of fire, by 
which the seal of virtue is branded as deep 
as ever iron burnt into a convict’s flesh the 
seal of crime. But always, hitherto, after 
the great period, has followed the day of 
luxury, and pursuit of the arts for pleasure 
only, And all has so ended. 


The Queen of the Air. 155 


106. Thus far of Abbeville building. Now 
I have here asserted two things,—first, 
the foundation of art in moral character ; 
next, the foundation of moral character in 
war. I must make both these assertions 
clearer, and prove them. 

First, of the foundation of art in moral 
character. Of course art-gift and amiability 
of disposition are two different things ; fora 
good man is not necessarily a painter, nor 
does an eye for color necessarily imply an 
honest mind. But great art implies the 
union of both powers ; it is the expression, 
by an art-gift, of a pure soul. If the gift is 
not there, we can have noart atall; and if 
the soul—and a right soul too—is not there, 
the art is bad, however dexterous. 

107. But also, remember, that the art-gift 
itself is only the result of the moral character 
of generations. A bad woman may have & 
sweet voice; but that sweetness of voice 
comes of the past morality of her race. 
That she can sing with it at all, she owes to 
the determination of laws of music by the 
morality of the past. Every act, every im- 
pulse, of virtue and vice, affects in any creat- 
ure, face, voice, nervous power, and vigor 


156 The Queen of the Air. 


and harmony of invention, at once. Pere 
severance in rightness of human conduct ren- 
ders, after a certain number of generations, 
human art possible; every sin clouds it, be it 
ever so little a one; and persistent vicious 
living and following of pleasure render, after 
a certain number of generations, all art im- 
possible. Men are deceived by the long- 
suffering of the laws of nature, and mistake, 

in a nation, the reward of the virtue of its 
sires, for the issueofitsownsins. Thetime 
of their visitation will come, and that inevi- 
tably; for, it is always true, that if the 
fathers have eaten sour grapes, the children’s 
teeth are set on edge. And for the individ- 
ual, as soon as you have learned to read, 

you may, as I said, know him to the heart’s 
core, through his art. Let his art-gift be 
never so great, and cultivated to the height 
‘by the schools ofa great race of men, and it 
is still but a tapestry thrown over his own 

being and inner soul; and the bearing of it 
will show, infallibly, whetherit hangs on a 
man or on askeleton. If you are dim-eyed, 

you may not see the difference in the fall of 
the folds at first, but learn how to look, and 
the folds themselves will become transe 


The Queen of the Air. 157 


parent, and you shall see through them the 
death's shape, or the divine one, making the 
tissue above it as a cloudof light, or asa 
winding-sheet. 

108. Then further, observe, I have said 
(and you will find it true, andthat to the 
uttermost) that, as all lovely art is rooted in 
virtue, so it bears fruit of virtue, and is didac- 
Wc inits, Own nature. It is often didactic 
also in actually expressed thought, as Giot- 
to’s, Michael Angelo’s, Diirer’s, and hundreds 
more ; but that is not its special function ; 
it is didactic chiefly by being beautiful ; but 
beautiful with haunting thought, no less 
than with form, and full of myths that can 
be read only with the heart. 

For instance, at this moment there is open 
beside me as I write, a page of Persian 
manuscript, wrought with wreathed azure 
and gold, and soft green, and violet, and 
tuby and scarlet, into one field of pure re- 
splendence. It is wrought to delight the 
eyes only; and does delight them; and 
. the man who did it assuredly had eyes in 
his head; but not much more. It is not 
didactic art, but its author was happy ; and 
it wil] do the good, and the harm, that mere 


158 Che Queen of the Air. 


pleasure can do. But, opposite me, is an 
early Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva, 
taken about two miles from Geneva, on the 
Lausanne road, with Mont Blanc in the dis- 
tance. The old city is seen lying beyond 
the waveless waters veiled with a sweet 
misty veil of Athena’s weaving ; a faint light 
of morning, peaceful exceedingly, and al- 
most colorless, shed from behind the Voi- 
rons, increases into soft amber along the 
slope of the Saléve, and is justseen, and no 
more, on the fair warm fields of its summit, 
between the folds of a white cloud that rests 
upon the grass, but rises, high and tower- 
like, into the zenith of dawn above. 

109.. There is not as much color in that 
low amber light upon the hillside as there 
is in the palest dead leaf. [he lake is not 
blue, but gray in mist, passing into deep 
shadow beneath the Voirons’ pines ; a few 
dark clusters of leaves, asingle white flower 
—scarcely seen—are all the gladness given 
to the rocks of the shore. One of the ruby 
spots of the eastern manuscript would give 
color enough for all the red that is in Tur- 
ner’s entiredrawing. For the mere pleasure 
of the eye, there is not so much in all thoss 


The Queen of the Afr, 159 


lines of his, throughout theentire landscape, 
as in half an inch square of the Persian’s 
page. What madehim take pleasure in the 
low color that is only like the brown of a 
dead leaf? in the cold gray of dawn—in the 
one white flower among the rocks—in these 
—and no more than these? 

110. He took pleasure in them because he 
had been bred among English fields and 
hills ; because the gentleness of a great race 
was in his heart, and its powers of thought 
in his brain ; because he knew the stories of 
the Alps, and of the cities at their feet ; be- 
cause he had read the Homeric legends of 
the clouds, and beheld the gods of dawn, 
and the givers of dew to the fields ; because 
he knew the faces of the crags, and the im- 
agery of the passionate mountains, as aman 
knows the face of his friend; because he 
had in him the wonder and sorrow concern- 
ing life and death, which are the inheritance 
of the Gothic soul from the days of its first 
sea kings; and also the compassion and the 
joy that are woven into the innermost fabric 
of every great imaginative spirit, born now 
in countries that have lived by the Christian 
faith with any courage or truth, And the 


160 The Queen of the Fir. 


picture contains also, for us, just this which 
its maker had in him to give ; and can con- 
vey it to us, just so far as we are of the tem- 
per in “which at must* berreceived. sslieis 
didactic if we are worthy to be taught, not 
otherwise. The pure heart, it will make 
more pure; the thoughtful, more thought- 
ful. It has in it no words forthe reckless or 
the base. 

111. As I myself look at it, there is no 
fault nor folly of my life—and both have 
been many and great—that does nct rise up 
against me, and take away my joy, and 
shorten my power of possession of sight, of 
understanding. Andevery past effort of my 
life, every gleam of rightness or good in it, 
is with me now, to help me in my grasp of 
tseatt ands its Vision. 4 DOn lor dsm acen 
rejoice in, or interpret either, my power is 
owing to whatof rightthereisinme. I dare 
to say it, that, because through all my life I 
have desired good, and not evil; because I 
have been kind tomany; have wished to be 
kind to all; have wilfully injured none ; and 
because I haveloved much, andnot selfishly ; 
therefore, the morning light is yet visible to 
me on those hills, and you, who read, may 


The Queen of the Hir. 161 


trust my thought and word in such work as 
Ihave to do for you; and you will be glad 
afterwards that you have trusted them. 

112. Yet, remember,—I repeat it again 
and yet again,—that I may for once, if pos- 
sible, make this thing assuredly clear: the 
inherited art-gift must be there, as well as 
the life in some poor measure, or rescued 
fragment, right. This art-gift of mine could 
not have been won by any work or by any 
conduct: it belongs to me by birthright, and 
came by Athena’s will, from the air of Eng- 
lish country villages, and Scottish hills, I 
will risk whatever charge of folly may come 
on me, for printing one of my many childish 
thymes, written on a frosty day in Glen Farg, 
just north of Loch Leven. It bears date rst 
January, 1828. I was born on the 8th of 
February, 1819; and all that I ever could be, 
and all that I cannot be, the weak little 
thyme already shows. 


“Papa, how pretty those icicles are, 
That are seen so near,—that are seen so far; 
—Those dropping waters that come from the rocks 
And many a hole, like the haunt of a fox. 
That silvery stream that runs babbling along, 
Making a murmuring, dancing soug. 
Li 


162 The Queen of the Air. 


Those trees that stand waving upon the rock’s sidq 
And men, that, like spectres, among them glide. 
And waterfalls that are heard from far, 

And come in sight when very near. 

And the water-wheel that turns slowly round, 
Grinding the corn that—requires to be ground— 


(Political Economy of the future !) 


——dAnd mountains at a distance seen, 
And rivers winding through the plain, 
And quarries with their craggy stones, 
And the wind among them moans.” 


So foretelling Stones of Venice, and this 
essay on Athena. 

Enough now concerning myself. 

113. Of Turner's life, and of its good and 
evil, both great, but the good immeasurably 
the greater, his work is in all things a per- 
fect and transparent evidence. His biogra- 
phy is simply, ‘‘ He did this, nor will ever 
another do its like again.” Yet read what I 
have said of him, as compared with the 
great Italians, in the passages taken from 
the ‘‘Cestus of Aglaia,” farther on, § 158, pp. 
164, 165. 

114. This, then, is the nature of the con- 
nection between morals with art. Now, 


The Queen of the Air. 163 


secondly, I have asserted the foundation of 
both these, at least hitherto, in war. The 
reason of this too manifest fact is, that, 
until now it has been impossible for any 
nation, except a warrior one, to fix its mind 
wholly on its men, instead of on their posses- 
sions. [Every great soldier nation thinks, 
necessarily, first of multiplying its bodies 
and souls of men, in good temper and strict 
discipline. As long as this is its political 
aim, it does not matter what it temporarily 
suffers, or loses, either in numbers or in 
wealth ; its morality and its arts (if it have 
national art-gift) advance together ; but so 
soon as it ceases to be a warrior nation, it 
thinks of its possessions instead of its men; 
and then the moral and poetic powers vanish 
together. 

115. It is thus, however, absolutely nec- 
essary to the virtue of war that it should be 
waged by personal strength, not by money 
or machinery. A nation that fights with a 
mercenary force, or with torpedoes instead of 
its own arms, is dying. Not but that there 
is more true courage in modern than even in 
ancient war; but this is, first, because all 
the remaining life of European nations is 


164 The Queen of the Fir. 


with a morbid intensity thrown into their 
soldiers ; and, secondly, because their pres- 
ent heroism is the culmination of centuries 
of inbred and traditional valor, which Athena 
taught them by forcing them to govern the 
foam of the sea-wave and of the horse, —not 
the steam of kettles. 

116. And further, note this, which is vital 
to us in the present crisis: If war is to be 
made by money and machinery, the nation 
which is the largest and most covctous mul- 
titude will win. You may be as scientific 
as you choose ; the mob that can pay more 
for sulphuric acid and gunpowder will at 
last poison its bullets, throw acid in your 
faces, and make an end of you; of itself, 
also, in good time, but of you first. And to 
the English people the choice of its fate 
is very near now. It may spasmodically 
defend its property with iron walls a fathom 
thick, a few years longer—a very few. No 
walls will defend either it, or its havings, 
against the multitude that is breeding and 
spreading faster than the clouds, over the 
habitable earth. We shall-be allowed to 
live by small pedler’s business, and iron- 
mongery—since we have chosen those for 


The Queenof the Air. 165 


Our line of life—as long as we are found useful 
black servants to the Americans, and are 
content to dig coals and sit in the cinders ; 
and have still coals to dig,—they once ex- 
hausted, or got cheaper elsewhere, we shall 
be abolished. But if we think more wisely, 
while there is yet time, and set our minds 
again on multiplying Englishmen, and not 
on cheapening English wares, if we resolve 
to submit to wholesome laws of labor and 
economy, and setting our political squabbles 
aside, try how many strong creatures, friend- 
ly and faithful to each other, we can crowd 
into every spot of English dominion, neither 
poison nor iron will prevail against us ; nor 
traffic, nor hatred ; the noble nation will yet, 
by the grace of heaven, rule over the ignoble, 
and force of heart hold its own against fire- 
balls. 

117. But there is yet a further reason for 
the dependence of the arts on war. The 
vice and injustice of the world are con- 
stantly springing anew, and are only to be 
subdued by battle ; the keepers of order and 
law must always be soldiers. And now, 
going back to the myth of Athena, we see 
that though she is first a warrior maid, she 


166 The Queen of the Air. 


detests war for its own sake; she arms 
Achilles and Ulysses in just quarrels, but 
she désarms Arcs. She contends, herself, 
continually against disorder and convulsion, 
in the earth giants ; she stands by Hercules’ 
side in victory over all monstrous evil; in 
justice only she judges and makes war. But 
in this war of hers she is wholly implacable. 
She has little notion of converting criminals. 
There is no faculty of mercy in her when 
she hasbeen resisted. Her word is only, ‘‘I 
will mock when your fear cometh.” Note 
the words that follow: ‘‘“whcen your fear 
cometh as desolation, and your destruction 
as a whirlwind;” for her wrath is of 
irresistible tempest : once roused, it is blind 
and deaf,—rabies—madness of anger—dark- 
ness of the Dies Ire. 

And that is, indeed, the sorrowfullest fact 
we have to know about our own several 
lives. Wisdom never forgives. Whatever 
resistance we have offered to her law, she 
avenges forever ; the lost hour can never be 
redeemed, and the accomplished wrong 
never atoned for. The best that can be 
done afterwards, but for that, had been 
better; the falsest of all the cries of peace, 


The Queen of the Air. 167 


where there is no peace, is that of the 
pardon of sin, as the mob expect it. Wis- 
dom can ‘‘put away” sin, but she cannot 
pardon it; and she is apt, in her haste, to 
put away the sinner as well, when the 
black zegis is on her breast. 

118. And this is also a fact we have to 
know about our national life, that itis ended 
as soon as it has lost the power of noble 
Anger. When it paints over, and apologizes 
for its pitiful criminalities ; and endures its 
false weights, and its adulterated food; 
dares not to decide practically between good 
and evil, and can neither honor the one, 
nor smite the other, but sneers at the good, as 
if it were hidden evil, and consoles the evil 
with pious sympathy, and conserves it in the 
sugar of its leaden heart,—the end is come. 

Proms Lhe sirst sion. tne, ol Athena s 
presence with any people is that they be- 
come warriors, and that the chief thought 
of every man of them is to stand rightly in 
his rank, and not fail from his brother’s side 
in batile. Wealth, and pleasure, and even 
love, areall, under Athena’s orders, sacrificed 
to this duty of standing fast in the rank of 
Wal, 


168 The Queen of the Aft. 


But further: Athena presides over indus- 
try, as well as battle; typically, over 
women’s industry ; that brings comfort with 
pleasantness. Her word to usallis: ‘‘Be 
well exercised, andrightly clothed. Clothed, 
and in your right minds; not insane and in 
rags, nor in soiled fine clothes clutched from 
each other’s shoulders. Fight and weave. 
Then I myself will answer for the course of 
the lance, and the colors of the loom.” 

And now I will ask the reader to look 
with some care through these following 
passages respecting modern multitudes and 
their occupations, written long ago, but left 
in fragmentary form, in which they must 
now stay, and be of what use they can. 

120. It is not political economy to put a 
number of strong men down on an acre of 
ground, with no lodging, and nothing to eat. 
Nor is it political economy to build a city 
on good ground, and fill it with store of 
corn and treasure, and put a score of lepers 
to live init. Political economy creates to- 
gether the means of life, and the living 
persons who are to use them ; and of both, 
the best and the most that it can, but 
imperatively the best, not the most, A few 


Tbe Queen of the Atr, 169 


good and healthy men, rather than a multi- 
tude of diseased rogues ; and a little real 
milk and wine rather than much chalk and 
petroleum ; but the gist of the whole busi- 
ness is that the men and their property must 
both be produced together—not one to the 
loss of the other. Property must not be 
creeted in lands desolate by exile of their 
people, nor multiplied and depraved human- 
ity, in lands barren of bread. 

121. Nevertheless, though the men and 
their possessions are to be increased at the 
same time, the first object of thought is 
always to be the multiplication of a worthy 
people. The strength of the nation is in its 
multitude, not in its territory; but only in 
its sound multitude. Itis one thing, both 
in aman anda nation, to gain flesh, and 
another to be swollen with putrid humors. 
Not that multitude ever ought to be incon- 
sistent with virtue. Two men should be 
wiser than one, and two thousand than two ; 
nor do I know another so gross fallacy in 
the records of human stupidity as that excuse 
for neglect of crime by greatness of cities. 
As if the first purpose of congregation were 
not to devise laws and repress crimes! As 


170 Che Queen of the Afr, 


if bees and wasps could live honestly in 
fiocks—men, only in separate dens! As if 
it were easy to help one another on the 
opposite sides ofa mountain, and impossible 
on the opposite sides of a street! But when 
ine. men.are true and good, and stand 
shoulder to shoulder, the strength of any 
nation is in its quantity of life, not in its land 
nor gold. The more good men a state has, 
in proportion to its territory, the stronger the 
staté. And as it has been:the madness of 
economists to seek for gold instead of life, so 
it has been the madness of kings to seek for 
land instead of life. They want thetown on 
the other side of the river, and seek it at the 
Spear point; if mevers enters theirgstupid 
heads that to double the honest souls in the 
town on ¢hzs side of the river would make 
them stronger kings; and that this doubling 
might be done by the ploughshare instead 
of the spear, and through happiness instead 
of misery. 

Therefore, in brief, this is the object of all 
true policy and true economy: ‘‘utmost 
multitude of good menon every given space 
of ground ’”—imperatively always good, 
sound, honest men,—not a mab of whites 


The Queen of the Aic 171 


faced thieves. Sothat, on the one hand all 
aristocracy is wrong which is inconsistent 
with numbers ; and on the other all numbers 
are wrong which are inconsistent with 
breeding. 

122. Then, touching the accumulation of 
wealth for the maintenance of such men, 
observe, that you must never use the terms 
“‘money ” and ‘‘ wealth” as synonymous. 
Wealth consists of the good, and therefore 
useful, things in the possession of the 
nation ; money is only the written or coined 
sign of the relative quantities of wealth in 
each person’s possession. All money is a 
divisible title-deed, of immense importance 
as an expression. of right to property, but 
absolutely valueless as propertyitself. Thus, 
supposing a nation isolated from all others, 
the money in its possession is, at its maxi- 
mum value, worth all the property of the 
nation, andno more, because no more can be 
got for it. And the money of all nations is 
worth, at its maximum, the property of all 
nations, and no more, for no more can be 
got for it. Thus, every article of property 
produced increases, by its value, the value 
of all the money in the world, and every 


172 The Queen of the Ait. 


article of property destroyed, diminishes the 
value of all the money in the world. If ten 
men are cast away on a rock, with a thou- 
sand pounds in their pockets, and there is 
on the rock, neither food nor shelter, their 
money is worth simply nothing, for nothing 
is to be had for it. If they built ten huts, 
and recover a cask of biscuit from the wreck, 
then their thousand pounds, at its maximum 
value, is worth ten huts and a cask of biscuit. 
If they make their thousand pounds into 
two thousand by writing new notes, their 
two thousand pounds are still worth ten 
huts and a cask of biscuit. And the law of 
relative value is the same for all the world, 
and all the people in it, and all their prop- 
erty, as for ten men: on arock, Therefore, 
money is truly and finally lost in the degree 
in which its value is taken from it (ceasing 
in that degree to be money at all); and it is 
truly gained in the degree in which value 
is added to it. Thus, suppose the money 
coined by the nation be a fixed sum, divided 
very minutely (say into francs and cents), 
and neither to be added to nor diminished. 
Then every grain of food and inch of lodg- 
ing added to its possessions makes every 


The Queen of the Hir. 173 


cent in its pockets worth proportionally 
more, and every grain of food it consumes, — 
and inch of roof it allows to fall to ruin, 
makes every cent in its pockets worth less; 
and this with mathematical precision. The 
immediate value of the money at particular 
times and places depends, indeed, on the 
humors of the possessors of property ; but 
the nation is in the one case gradually get- 
ting richer, and will feel the pressure of pov- 
erty steadily everywhere relaxing, whatever 
the humors of individuals may be; and, in 
the other case, is gradually growing poorer, 
and the pressure of its poverty will every day 
tell more and more, in ways that it cannof 
explain, but will most bitterly feel. 

123. The actual quantity of money which 
it coins, in relation to its real property, is 
therefore only of consequence for conven~ 
ience of exchange; but the proportion in 
which this quantity of money is divided 
among individuals expresses their various 
rights to greater or less proportions of the 
national property, and must not, therefore, 
be tampered with. The government may 
at any time, with perfect justice, double its 
issue of coinage, if it gives every man whe 


174 The Queen of the Air. 


had ten pounds in his pocket another ten 
pounds, and every man who had ten pence 
another ten pence; for it thus does not 
make any of them richer ; it merely divides 
their counters for them into twice the num- 
ber. Butif it gives the newly-issucd coins 
to other people, or keeps them liiself, it 
simply robs the former holders to precisely 
that extent. This most important function 
of money, as a title-deed, on the non-viola- 
tion of which all national soundness of com- 
merce and peace of life depend, has been 
never rightly distinguished by economists 
from the quite unimportant function of 
money as a means of exchange. You can 
exchange goods—at some inconvenience, 
indeed, but still you can contrive to do it— 
without money at all; but you cannot 
maintain your claim to the savings of your 
past iife without a document declaring the 
amount of them, which the nation and its 
government will respect. 

124, And as economists have lost sight of 
this great function of money in relation to 
individual rights, so they have equally lost 
sight of its function as a representative of 
good things. That, for every good thing 


The Queen of the Air. 175 


produced, so much money is put into every- 
body’s pocket, is the one simple and primal 
truth for the public to know, and for econ- 
omists to teach, How many of them have 
taught it? Some have; but only incident- 
ally; and others will say it is a truism. 
If it be, do the public know it? Does 
your ordinary English householder know 
that every costly dinner he gives has de- 
stroyed forever as much money as it is 
worth? Does every well-educated girl—do 
even the women in high political position— 
know that every fine dress they wear them- 
Selves. -Orescause 9to- be) worn, (destroys 
precisely so much of the national money as 
the labor and material of it are worth? If 
this be a truism, it is one that needs pro- 
claiming somewhat louder. 

125. That, then, is the relation of money 
and goods. So much goods, so much 
money; so little goods, so little money. 
But, as there is this true relation between 
money and ‘‘goods,” or good things, so 
there is a false relation between money and 
“‘bads,” or bad things. Many bad things 
will fetch a price in exchange; but th « do 
not increase the wealth of the sountry. 


176 The Queen of the Afr. 


Good wine is wealth, drugged wine is not; 
good meat is wealth, putrid meat is not; 
good pictures are wealth, bad pictures are 
not. A thing is worth precisely what it can 
do for you; not what you choose to pay for 
it. You may pay a thousand pounds fora 
cracked pipkin, if you please; but you do 
not by that transaction make the cracked 
pipkin worth one that will hold water, nor 
that, nor any pipkin whatsoever, worth more 
than it was before you paid such sum for it. 
You may, perhaps, induce many potters to 
manufacture fissured pots and many ama- 
teurs of clay to buy them ; but the nation is, 
through the whole business so encouraged, 
rich by the addition to its wealth of so many 
potsherds,—and there an end. The thing 
is worth what it can do for you, not what 
you think it can ; and most national luxuries, 
nowadays, are a form of potsherd, provided 
for the solace of a self-complacent Job, vol- 
untary sedent on his ash-heap. 

126. And, also, so far as good things al- 
ready exist, and have become media of ex- 
change, the variations in their prices are ab- 
solutely indifferent to the nation. Whethet 
Mr. A. buys a Titian from Mr. B. far twenty, 


The Queen of the Bit. 177 


or for two thousand, pounds, matters not 
sixpence to the national revenue; that is to 
say, it matters in nowise to the revenue 
whether Mr. A. has the picture, and Mr. B. 
the money, or Mr. B. the picture, and Mr. 
A. the money. Which of them will spend the 
money most wisely, and which of them will 
keep the picture most carefully, is, indeed, 
a matter of some importance ; but this can- 
not be known by the mere fact of exchange, 
127. Ihe wealth of a nation then, first, 
and its peace and well-being besides, depend 
on the number of persons it can employ in 
making good and useful things. I say its 
well-being also, for the character of men de- 
ends more on their occupations: than on 
any teaching wecan give them, or principles 
with which we can imbue them. The em- 
ployment forms the habits of body and mind, 
~ and these are the constitution of the man, — 
the greater part of his moral or persistent 
nature, whatever effort, under special ex- 
citement, he may make to change or over- 
come them. Employment is the half, and 
the primal half, of education—it is the warp 
of it; and the fineness or the endurance 


of all subsequently woven pattern depends 
12 


178 Tbe Queen of the Hirt. 


wholly on its straightness and strength. 
And, whatever difficulty there may be in 
tracing through past history the remoter 
connections of event and cause, one chain 
of sequence is always clear: the formation, 
namely, of the character of nations by their 
employments, and the determination of their 
final fate by their character. The moment, 
and the first direction of decisive revolutions, 
often depend on accident ; but their persist- 
ent course, and their consequences, depend 
wholly on the nature of the people. The 
passing of the Reform Bill by the late Iing- 
lish Parliament may have becn more or 
less accidental; the results of the measure’ 
now rest on the character of the English 
people, as it has been developed by their 
recent interests, occupations, and habits of 
lites” Whether, Pasa ebody, they=employ, 
their new powers for good or evil will de- 
pend, not on their facilities of knowledge, 
nor even on the general intelligence they 
may possess, but on the number of persons 
among them whom wholesome employ- 
ments have rendered familiar with the duties, 
and modest in their estimate of the promises, 
oi life. 


The Queen of the Air. 179 


128. But especially in framing laws re- 
specting the treatment or employment of ime 
provident and more or less vicious persons, 
itis to be remembered that as men are not 
made heroes by the performance of an act 
of heroism, but must be brave before they 
can perform it, so they are not made villains 
by the commission of a crime, but were vil- 
lains before they committed it ; and the right 
of public interference with their conduct 
begins when they begin to corrupt them- 
selves,—not merely at the moment when 
they have proved themselves hopelessly 
corrupt. 

All measures of reformation are effective 
in exact proportion to their timeliness : par- 
tial decay may be cut away and cleansed ; 
incipient error corrected; but there is a point 
at which corruption can no more be stayed, 
nor wandering recalled. It has been the 
manner of modern philanthropy to remain 
passive until that precise period, and to 
leave the sick to perish, and the foolish 
to stray, while it spent itself in frantic exer- 
tions to raise the dead, and reform the dust. 

The recent direction of a great weight of 
public opinion against capital’ punishment 


-180 The Queen of the Air. 


is, I trust, the sign of an awakening perceps 
tion that punishment is the last and worst 
instrument in the hands of the legislator for 
the prevention of crime. The true instru- 
ments of reformation are employment and 
reward; not punishment. Aid the willing, 
honor the virtuous, and compel the idle into 
occupation, and there will be no need for 
the compelling of any into the great and last 
indolence of death. 

129. The beginning of all crue reformation 
among the criminal classes depends on the 
establishment of institutions for their active 
employment, while their criminality is still 
unripe, and their feelings of selfrespect, 
capacities of affection, and sense of justice, 
not altogether quenched. That those who 
are desirous of employment should always 
be able to find it, will hardly, at the pres- 
ent day, be disputed; but that those who 
are wndesirous of employment should of all 
persons be the most strictly compelled to it, 
the public are hardly yet convinced; and 
they must be convinced. If the danger of 
the principal thoroughfares in their capital 
city, and the multiplication of crimes more 
ghastly than ever yet disgraced a nominal 


The Queen of the Hir. 181 


civilization, are not enough, they will not 
have to wait long before they receive sterner 
lessons. Forour neglect ofthe lower orders 
has reached a point at which it begins to 
bear its necessary fruit, and every day makes 
the fields, not whiter, but more sable, to 
harvest. 

130. The general principles by which em- 
ployment should be regulated may be briefly 
stated as follows : 

1. There being three great classes of me- 
chanical powers at our disposal, namely, (a) 
vital or muscular power; (0) natural me- 
chanical power of wind, water, and electri- 
city ; and (c) artificially produced mechani- 
cal power; it is the first principle of econ- 
omy to use all available vital power first, 
then the inexpensive natural forces, and 
only at last to have recourse to artificial 
power. And this because itis always better 
for a man to work with his own hands to feed 
and clothe himself, than to stand idle while a 
machine works for him; andif he cannot by 
all the labor healthily possible to him feed 
and clothe himself, then it is better to use 
an inexpensive machine—as a windmill or 
watermill—than a costly one like a steam: 


182 The Queen of the Hir. 


engine, so lone as we have natural force 
enough at our disposal. Whereas at present 
we continually hear economists regret that 
the water-power of the cascades or streams 
of a country should be lost, but hardly ever 
that the muscular power of its idle inhabit- 
ants should be lost; and, again, we sce 
vast districts, as the south of Provence, 
where astrong wind* blows steadily all day 
long for six days out of seven throughout 
the year, without a windmill, while men are 
continually employed a hundred miles to the 
north, in digging fuel to obtain artificial 
power. But the principal point of all to be 
kept in vicw is, that in every idle arm and 
shoulder throuvhout the country there is a 
certain quantity of force, equivalent to the 
force of so much fuel; and that it is mere 
insane waste to dig for coal for our force, 
while the vital force is unused, and not only 
unused, but in being so, corrupting and 
polluting itself. We waste our coal, and 
spoil our humanity at one and the same in- 
stant. Therefore, wherever there is an idle 


*In order fully to utilize this natural power, we 
only require machinery to turn the variable into a cons 
stant velocity—no insurmountable difficulty, 


The Queen of the Hir. 183 


arm, always save coal with it, and the stores 
of England wiil last all the longer. And 
precisely the same argument answers the 
common one about ‘taking employment 
out of the hands of the industrious laborer.” 
Why, what is ‘‘employment” but the putting 
out of vital force instead of mechanical force? 
We are continually in search of means of 
strength to pull, to hammer, to fetch, to 
carry. We waste our future resources to 
ect this strength, while we leave all the 
living fuel to burn itself out in mere pestif- 
erous breath, and production of its variously 
noisome forms cf ashes! Clearly, if we 
want fire for force, we want men fcr force 
first. The industrious hands must already 
bevescOoemuci todo thet they canido no 
more, or clsc \.e need not use machines to 
help them. Then use the idle hands first. 
Instead of dragging petroleum witha steam- 
‘ engine, put it on a canal, and drag it with 
human arms and shoulders. Petroleum can- 
not possibly bein a hurry to arrive any- 
where. We can always order that, and 
many other things, time enough before we 
want it. So, the carriage of everything 
which does not spoil by keeping may most 


184 The Queen of the Air. 


wholesomely and safely be done by water. 
traction and sailing-vessels ; and no healthier 
work can men be put to, nor better dis- 
cipline, than such active porterage. 

131. (2d.) In employing all the mus- 
cular power at our disposal we are to make 
the employments we choose as educational 
as possible; for a wholesome human em- 
ployment is the first and best method of 
education, mental as well as bodily. Aman 
taught to plough, row, or steer well, and a 
woman taught to cook properly, and make 
a dress neatly, are already educatedin many 
essential moral habits. Labor considcred 
as a discipline has hitherto been thought of 
only for criminals ; but the real and noblest 
function of labor is to prevent crime, and 
not to be keformatory, but Formatory. 

132. The third great principle of employ- 
ment is, that whenever there is pressure of 
poverty to be met, all enforced occupation 
should be directed to the production of use- 
ful articles only; that isto say, of food, of 
simple clothing, of lodging, or of the means 
of conveying, distributing, and preserving 
these. It is yet little understood by econo- 
mists, and not atall by the public, that the 


The Queen of the Hir. 185 


> 


employment of persons in a useless business 
cannot relieve ultimate distress. The money 
given to employ riband-makers at Coventry 
is merely so much money withdrawn from 
what would have employed lace-makers at 
Honiton ; cr makers of something else, as 
useless, elsewhere. We must spend our 
money in some way, at some time, and it 
cannot at any time bespent without employ- 
ing somcbody. If we gambleit away, the 
person who wins it must spend it; if we 
lose it in a railroad speculation, it has gone 
into some one else’s pockets, or merely 
gone to pay navvies for making a useless 
embankment, instead of to pay riband or 
button makers for making useless ribands or 
buttons ; we cannot lose it (unless by actu- 
ally destroying it) without giving employ- 
ment ofsome kind ; and, therefore, whatever 
quantity of money exists, the relative 
quantity of employment must some day 
come out of it; but the distress of the nation 
signifies that the employments given have 
produced nothing that will support its 
existence. Men cannot live on ribands, or 
buttons, or velvet, orby going quickly from 
place to place; and every coin spent in 


156 The Queen of the Air. 


useless ornament, cr useless motion, is so 
much withdrawn from the national means 
of life. One of the most beautiful uscs of 
railroads is to enable A to travel from the 
town of X to take away the business of B 
in the town of-Y ; while, in the mean time, B 
travels from the town of Y to takeaway A’s 
business in the townof X. But the national 
wealth is not increased by these operations. 
Whereas every coin spent in cultivating 
ground, in repairing lodging, in making 
necessary and good roads, in preventing 
dangcr by sea or land, and in carriage of 
food or fuel where they are required, is so 
much absolute and direct gain to the whole 
nation. To cultivate land round Coventry 
makes living easier ct Honiton, and every 
acre of sand gained from the sea in Lincoln- 
shire, makes life easicr all over England. 
4th, and lastly. Since for every idle per- 
son some one else must be working some- 
where to provide him with clothes and food, 
and doing, therefore, double the quantity of 
work that would be enough for his own 
needs, it is only a matter of pure justice to 
compel the idle person to work for his 
maintenance himself ‘The conscription has 


Tbe Queen of the Air, 137 


been used in many countries to take away 
laborers who supported their families, from 
their useful work, and maintain them for 
purposes chiefly of military display at the 
public expense. Since this has been long 
endured by the most civilized nations, let it 
not be thought they would not much more 
gladly endure a conscription which shoula4 
seize only the vicious and idle, already living 
by criminal procedures at the public ex- 
pense; and which should discipline and 
educate them to labor which would not only 
maintain themselves, but be serviceable to 
the commonwealth. The question is simply 
this: we mustfeed the drunkard, vacabond, 
and thicf; but shall we do so by letting 
them steal thcir food, and do no work for it? 
or shall we give them their food in appointed 
quantity, and enforce their doing work 
which shall be worth it, and which, in 
process of time, will redeem their own 
characters and make them happy andservice- 
able members of society ? 

I find by me a violent little fragment of 
undelivered lecture, which puts this, perhaps, 
still moreclearly. Your idle people (it says), 
as they are now, are not merely waste coal 


| 188 woe Queen of the Air 


beds. They are explosive coal-beds, which 
you pay a high annual rent for. You are 
keeping all these idle persons, remember, at 
far greater cost than if they were busy. Do 
you think a vicious person eats less than an 
honest one? or that it is cheaper to keep a 
bad man drunk, than a good man sober? 
There is, I suppose, a dim idea in the mind 
of the public, that they don’t pay for the 
maintenance of people they don’t employ. 
Those staggering rascals at the street corner, 
grouped around its splendid angle of public- 
house, we fancy that they are no servants 
of ours! that we pay them no wages! that 
no cash out of our pockets is spent over that 
beer-stained counter ! 

Whose cash is it then they are spending? 
It is not got honestly by work. You know 
thatemuch. (Where do; they vetaiteiomre 
Who has paid for their dinner and their pot? 
Those fellows can only live in one of two 
ways—by pillage orbeggary. Their annual 
income by thieving comes out of the public 
pocket, you will admit. They are not 
cheaply fed, so far as they are fed by theft. 
But the rest of their living—all that they don't 
steal—they must beg, Not with success 


The Queen of the Air, 189 


from you, you think. Wise, as benevolent, 
you never gave a penny in ‘‘ indiscriminate 
charity.” Well, I congratulate you on the 
freedom of your conscience from that sin, 
mine being bitterly burdened with the mem- 
ory of many a sixpence given to beggars of 
whom I knew nothing but that they had 
pale facesand thin waists. But it isnot that 
kind of street beggary that the vagabonds of 
our people chiefly practise. It is home beg- 
gary thatis the worst beggars’ trade. Home 
alms which it is their worst degradation to 
receive. Those scamps know well enough 
that you and your wisdom are worth noth- 
ing to them. They won't beg of you. 
They will beg of their sisters, and mothers, 
and wives, and children, andofany onc else 
who is enough ashamed of being of the same 
blood with them to pay to keep them out of 
sight. Every one of those blackguards is 
the bane of afamily. Zhatis the deadly 
‘‘indiscriminate charity ’’—the charity which 
each household pays to maintain its own 
private curse. 

133. And you think that is no affair of 
yours? and that every family ought to 
watch over and subdue its own living 


190 The Queen of the Air. 


plague? Putitto yourselves this way, then: 
suppose you knew every one of those families 
kept an idol in an inner room—a big-bellied 
bronze figure, to which daily sacrifice and 
oblation was made; at whose feet so much 
beer and brandy was poured out every morn- 
ing on the ground ; and before which, every 
night, good meat, enough for two men’s 
keep, was set, and left, tillit was putrid, and 
then carried out and thrown on the dunghill ; 
you would put'an end to that form of idol- 
atry with your best diligence, I suppose. 
You would understand then that the - beer, 
and brandy, and meat, were wasted; and 
that the burden imposed by each house- 
hold on itself lay heavily through them on the 
whole community? But, suppose further, 
that this idol were not of silent and quiet 
bronze only, but an ingenious mechanism, 
wound up every morning, torun itself down 
in automatic blasphemies ; that it struck and 
tore with its hands the people who set food 
before it; that it was anointed with poison- 
ous unguents, and infected the air for miles 
round. You would interfere with the idol- 
atry then, straightway ? Will you not inter- 
fere with it now, when the infection that the 


The Queen of the Hir. 198 


venomous idol spreads is not merely death, 
but sin ? 

134. So far the old lecture. Returning to 
cool English, the end of the matter is, that, 
sooner or later, we shall have to register our 
people; and to know how they live; and 
to make sure, if they are capable of work, 
that right work is given them to do. 

The different classes of work for which 
bodies of men could be consistently organ- 
ized, might ultimately become numerous ; 
these following divisions of occupation may 
at once besuggested : 

1. Load-making.—Good roads to be made, 
wherever needed, and kept in repair; and 
the annual loss on unfrequented roads, in 
spoiled horses, strained wheels, and time, 
done away with. 

2. Bringing in of waste land.—All waste 
lands not necessary for public health, to be 
made accessible and gradually reclaimed ; 
chiefly our wide and waste seashores. Not 
our mountains nor moorland. Our life de- 
pends on them, more than on the best arable 
we have. 

3. Harbor-making.—The deficiencies of 
safe ur convenicnt harborage in our smaller 


192 The Queen of the Air. 


ports to be remedied ; other harbors built at 
dangerous points of coast, and a disciplined 
body of men always kept in connection with 
the pilot and life-boat services. There is 
room for every order of intelligence in this 
work, and for a large body of superior officers, 

4. Porterage.—All heavy goods, not re- 
quiring speed in transit, to be carried (under 
preventive duty on transit, by railroad) by 
canal-boats, employing men for draught; 
and the merchant-shipping service extended 
by sea; so that no ships may be wrecked 
for want of hands, while there are idle ones 
in mischief on shore. 

5. Repair of buildings.—A body of menin 
various trades to be kept at the disposal of 
the authorities in every large town for re- 
pair of buildings, especially the houses of 
the poorer orders, who, if nosuch provisions 
were made, could not employ workmen on 
their own houses, but would simply live 
with rent walls and roofs. 

6. Dressmaking.—Substantial dress, of 
standard material and kind, strong shoes, 
and stout bedding, to be manufactured for 
the poor, soas torender it unnecessary for 
them, unless by extremity of improvidence, 


Tbe Queen of the Air. 193 


to wear cast clothes, or be without suffici- 
ency of clothing. 

7. Works of Art.—Schools to be estab- 
lished on thoroughly sound principles of 
manufacture, and use of materials, and with 
sample and, for given periods, unalterable 
modes of work; first, in pottery, and em- 
bracing gradually metal work, sculpture, 
and decorative painting; the two points 
insisted upon, in distinction from ordinary 
commercial establishments, being perfect- 
ness cf material to the utmost attainable de- 
gree ; and the production ofeverything by 
hand-work, forthe special purpose of de- 
veloping personal power and skill in the 
workman. 

Thelast two departments, and some sub- 
ordinate branches of others, would include 
the service of women and children. 

I give now, for such further illustrations 
as they contain of the points I desire most 
to insist upon with respect both to education 
and employment, a portion of the series of 
notes published some time ago in the ‘‘ Art 
Journal,” on the opposition of Modesty and 
Liberty, and the unescapable law of wise 
restraint. Jam sorry that they are written 

13 


194 The Queen of the Air. 


obscurely—and it may be thought affectedly ; 
but the fact is, I have always had three dif- 
ferent ways of writing : one, with the single 
view of making myself understood, in which 
I necessarily omit a great deal of what comes 
into. my head; another, in which I say 
what I think ought to be said, in what I sup- 
pose to be the best words I can find for it 
(which is in reality an affected style—be it 
good or bad); and my third way of writing 
is to say all that comes into my head for my 
own pleasure, in the first words that come, 
retouching them afterwards into (approxi- 
mate) grammar. These notes for the ‘‘Art 
Journal” were so written; and I like them 
myself, of course ; but ask the reader’s par- 
don for their confusedness. 

135. ‘‘Sir, it cannot be better done.” 

We will insist, with the reader’s permis- 
sion, on this comfortful saying of Albert 
Diirer’s in order to find out, if we may, what - 
Modesty is ; which it will be well for paint- 
ers, readers, and especially critics, to know, 
before going farther. Whatitis; or, rather, 
who she is, her fingers being among the 
deftest in laying the ground-threads of 
Aglaia’s cestus. 


The Queen of the Kir. 195 


For this same opinion of Albert’s is enter- 
tained by many other people respecting their 
own doings—a very prevalent opinion, 
indeed, I find it; and the answer itself, 
though rarely. made with the Nuremberger’s 
crushing decision, is nevertheless often 
enough intimated, with delicacy, by artists 
of all countries, in their various dialects. 
Neither can it always be held an entirely 
modest one, as it assuredly was in the man 
who would sometimes estimate a piece of his 
unconquerable work at only the worth cfa 
plate of fruit, or a flask of wine—would have 
have taken even one ‘‘fig for it,” kindly 
offered ; or given it royally for nothing, to 
show his hand to a fellow-king of his own, 
or any other craft—as Gainsborough gave 
the ‘‘Boy at the Stile” for a solo on the 
violin. An entirely modest saying, I repeat, 
in him—not always in us. For Modesty is 
‘‘the measuring virtue,” the virtue of modes 
or limits. She is, indeed, said to be only the 
third or youngest of the children of the car- 
dinal virtue, Temperance; and apt to be 
despised, being more given to arithmetic, 
and other vulgar studies (Cinderella-like), 
than her elder sisters ; but she is useful in 


196 The Queen of the Hie. 


the household, and arrives at great results 
with her yard-measure and slate-pencil—a 
pretty little Marchande des Modes, cutting 
her dress always according to the silk (if this 
be the proper feminine reading of ‘‘ coat 
according to the cloth”), so that, consulting 
with her carefully of a morning, men get to 
know not only their income, but their in 
being—to know /hemselves, that is, in a 
gaugers manner, round, and up and down 
—surface and contents; what is in them 
and what may be got out of them; and, 
in fine, their entire canon of weight and 
capacity. ‘That yard-measure of Modesty’s, 
lent to those who will use it, is a curious 
musical reed, and will go round and round 
waists that are slender enough, with latent 
melody in every joint of it, the dark root 
only being soundless, moist from the wave 
wherein 


“ Null’ altra pianta che facesse fronda 
O che ’n durasse, vi puote aver vita.’’ * 


But when the little sister herself takes it in 
hand, to measure things outside of us with, 
the joints shoot out in an amazing manner $ 


* “ Purgatorio,” i. 108, 109. 


The Queen of the Afr. 197 


the four-square walls even of celestial cities 
being measurable enough by that reed; 
and the way pointed to them, though only 
to be followed, or even seen, in the dim 
starlight shed down from worlds amidst 
which there is no name of Measure any 
more, though the reality of it always. For, 
indeed, to all true modesty the necessary 
business is not inlook, but outlook, and 
especially wflook: it is only her sister 
Shamefacedness, who is known by the 
drooping lashes—Modesty, quite otherwise, 
by her large eyes full of wondcr; for she 
never contemns herself, nor is eae of 
herself, but forgets herself—at least until she 
has done something worth memory. It is 
easy to peep and potter about one’s own 
deficiencies in a quict immodest discontent ; 
but Modesty is so pleased with other people’s 
doings, that she has no leisure to lament her 
own: and thus, knowing the fresh feeling of 
contentment, unstained with thought of self, 
she does not fear being pleased, when there 
is cause, with her own rightness, as with 
another’s, saying calmly, ‘‘ Be it mine or 
yours, or whose else’s it may, it is no mat- 
ter; this also is well.” Butthe right to say 


198 The Queen of the Hit. 


such a thing depends on continual reverence 
and manifold sense of failure. If you have 
known yourself to have failed, you may trust, 
when it comes, the strange consciousness of 
success; if you have faithfully loved the 
noble work of others, you need not fear to 
speak with respect of things duly done, of 
your own. 

136. But the principal good that comes of 
art being followed in this reverent feeling is 
vitally manifest in the associative conditions 
of it. Men who know their place can take 
it and kecp it, be it low or high, contentedly 
and firmly, neither yiclding nor grasping; 
and the harmony cf hand and thought fol- 
lows, rendcring ail great deeds cf art pos- 
sible—deeds in which the souls of men meet 
like the jewels in the windows of Aladdin’s 
palace,’ the vlittie igems and the larcesall 
equally pure, needing no cement but the 
fitting of facets ; while the associative work - 
of immodest men is all jointless, and astir 
with wormy ambition; putridly dissolute, 
and forever on the crawl: sothatif it come 
together for atime, it can only be by meta- 
morphosis through flash of volcanic fire out 
of the vale of Siddim, vitrifying the clay of 


The Queen of the Air. 199 


it, and fastening the slime, only to end in 
wilder scattering; according to the fate 
of those oldest, mightiest, immodestest of 
builders, of whom itis told in scorn, ‘‘They 
had brick for stone, and slime had they for 
mortar.” 

137. The first function of Modesty, then, 
being this recognition of place, her second 
is the recognition of law, and delight in it, 
for the sake of law itself, whether her part 
be to assert it, or obey. Jor as it belongs 
to all immodesty to defy or deny law, and 
- assert privilege and license, according to its 
own pleasure (it being therefore rizhtly 
called ‘‘insolent,”’ that is, ‘‘custom-break- 
ing,” violating some usual and appointed 
order to attain for itself greater forwardnecs 
or power), so itis the habit of all modesty 
to love the constancy and ‘‘ solemnity,” cz, 
literally, ‘‘accustomedness,” of law, seek- 
ing first what are the solemn, appointed, 
inviolable customs and general orders of 
nature, and of the Master of nature, touch- 
ing the matter in hand; and striving to put 
itself, as habitually and inviolably, in com- 
pliance with them. Out ot which habit, 
once established, arises what is rightly 


200 The Queen of the Att. 


called ‘‘ conscience,” not ‘‘ science” merely, 
but ‘‘with-science,” ascience ‘‘ with us,” 
such as only modest creatures can have—~ 
with or within them—and within all creation 
besides, every member of it, strong or weak, 
witnessing together, and joining in the 
happy consciousness that each one’s work 
is good; the bee also being profoundly of 
that opinion ; and the lark ; and the swallow, 
in that noisy, but modestly upside-down, 
Babel of hers, under the caves, with its un- 
volcanic slime for mortar ; and the two ants 
who are asking of cach other at the turn of 
that little ant’s-foot-worn path through the 
moss lor via ecs lerm@iortunacs) sanumine 
builders also, who built yonder pile of cloud- 
marblein the west, and the gilder who gilded 
it, and is gone down behind it. 

138. But I think we shall better under- 
stand what we ought of the nature of 
Modesty, and of her opposite, by taking a 
simple instance of both, in the practice of 
that art of music which the wisest have 
agreed in thinking the first element of edu- 
cation ; only I must ask the reader’s patience 
with me through a parenthesis. 

Among the foremost men whose powef 


The Queen of the Air. 201 


has had to assert itself, though with con- 
quest, yet with countless loss, through 
peculiarly English disadvantages of circum- 
stance, are assuredly to be ranked together, 
both for honor, and for mourning, Thomas 
Bewick and George Cruikshank. There is, 
howevcr, less cause for regret in the instance 
of Bewick. We may understand that it was 
well for us once to sce what an entirely 
powerful painter’s genius, and an entirely 
keen and true man’s temper, could achieve, 
together, unhelped, but also unharmed, 
among the black banks and wolds of Tyne. 
But the genius of Cruikshank has been cast 
away in an utterly ghastly and lamentable 
manner: his superb line-work, worthy of 
any class of subject, and his powcrs of con- 
ception and composition, of which I cannot 
venture to estimate the range in their de- 
graded application, having been condemned, 
by his fate, to be spent either in rude jesting, 
or in vain war with conditions of vice too 
low alike for record or rebuke, among the 
dregs of the British populace. Yet perhaps 
I am wrong in regretting even this: it may 
be an appointed lesson for futurity, that the 
art of the best English etcher in the nine 


202 The Queen of the Air. 


teenth century, spent on illustrations of the 
lives of burglars and drunkards, should one 
day be seen in museums beneath Greek 
vases fretted with drawings of the wars of 
Troy, or side by side with Diirer’s ‘‘ Knight 
and Death.” 

139. Be that as it may, I am at present 
glad to be able to refer to one of these per- 
petuations, by his strong hand, of such 
human character as our faultless British 
constitution occasionally produces in out-of- 
the-way corners. It is among his illustra- 
tions of the Irish Rebellion, and represents 
the pillage and destruction of a gentieman’s 
house by the mob. They have madea heap 
in the drawing-room of the furniture and 
books, to set first fire to ; and are tearing up 
the floor for its more easily kindled planks, 
the less busily-disposed meanwhile hacking 
round in rage, with axes, and smashing 
what they can with butt-ends of guns. Ido 
not care to follow with words the ghastly 
truth of the picture into its detail; but the 
most expressive incident of the whole, and 
the one immediately to my purpose, is 
this, that one fellow has sat himself at the 
piano, on which, hitting down fiercely with 


The Queen of the Air. 203 


his clenched fists, he plays, grinning, such 
tune as may be so producible, to which 
melody two of his companions, flourishing 
knotted sticks, dance, after their manner, on 
the top of the instrument. 

140. I think we have in this sais 
as perfect an instance as we require of the 
lowest supposable phase of immodest or 
licentious art in music; the ‘‘inner con- 
sciousness of good” being dim, even in the 
musician and his audience, and wholly un- 
sympathized with, and unacknowledged by 
the Delphian, Vestal, and all other prophetic 
and cosmic powers. This represented 
scene came into my mind suddenly one 
evening, a few weeks ago, in contrast with 
another which I was watching in its reality ; 
namely, a group of gentleschool-girls, lean- 
ing over Mr. Charles Hallé, as he was play- 
ing a variation on ‘‘ Home, Sweet Home.” 
They had sustained with unwonted courage 
the glance of subdued indignation with 
which, having just closed a rippling melody 
of Sebastian Bach’s (much like what one 
might fancy the singing of nightingales 
would be if they fed on honey instead of 
flies), he turned to the slight, popular air. 


204 The Queen of the Air. 


But they had their own associations with it, 
and besought for, and obtained it, and 
pressed close, at first, in vain, to see what 
no glance could follow, the traversing of the 
fingers. They soon thought no more of 
secing. The wet eyes, round-open, and 
the little scarlet upper lips, lifted, and drawn 
slightly together, in passionate glow of utter 
wonder, became picture-like, porcelain-like, 
in motionless joy, as the sweet multitude of 
low notes fell, in their timely infinities, like 
summer rain. Only La Robbia himself 
(nor even he, unless with tenderer use 
of color than is usual in his work) could 
have rendered some image of that listen- 
ing. 

141, But if the reader can give due vi- 
tality in his fancy to these two scenes, he 
will have in them representative types, 
clear enough for all future purpose, of the 
several agencies of debased and perfect art. 
And the interval may easily and continu- 
ously be filled by mediate gradations. Be- 
tween the entirely immodest, unmeasured, 
and (in evil sense) unmannered, execution 
with the fist; and the entirely modest, 
measured, and (in the noblest sense) mans 


Tye Queen of the Hir. 205 


nered, or moral’d execution with the finger; 
between the impaticnt and unpractised 
doing, containing in itself the witness of 
lasting impatience and idleness through 
all previous life, and the patient and prac- 
tised doing, containing in itself the witness 
ofself-restraint and unwearied toil through 
all previous life; between the expressed 
subject and sentiment cf home violation, 
and the expressed subjcct and sentiment 
of home love; between the sympathy of 
audience, given in irreverent and contempt- 
uous rage, joyless as the rabidness of a 
dog, and the sympathy of audience given 
in an almost appalled humility of intense, 
rapturous, and yct entirely reasoning 
and reasonable pleasure; between these 
two limits of octave, the reader will find he 
can class, according to its modesty, useful- 
ness, and grace, or becomingness, all other 
musical art. For although purity of purpose 
and fineness of execution by nomeans go 
together, degree to degree (since fine, and 
indeed all but the finest, work is often spent 
in the most wanton purpose—as in all our 
modern opera—and the rudest execution Is 
again often joined with purest purpose, as 





206 The Queen of the Afr. 


in a mother’s song to her child), still the 
entire accomplishment of music is only in 
the union of both. Tor the difference be- 
tween that ‘‘a!l but ” finest and “‘ finest” is 
an infinite one; and besides this, however 
the power of the performer, once attained, 
may be afterwards misdirected, in slavery 
to popular passion or childishness, and spend 
itsclf, at its sweetest, in idle melodies, cold 
and ephemcral (like Michael Angelo’s snow 
Statucsin the vother art) <orze se tim vicious 
difficulty and miserable noisc—crackling of 
thorns under the pot of public sensuality— 
still, the attainment cf this power, and the 
maintenance cf it, involve always in the 
exccutant some virtue or courave of high 
kind ; the understanding of which, and of 
the difference between the discipline which 
develops it and the disorderly efforts cf the 
amateur, it will be one of our first businesses 
to estimate rightly. Andthough not indeed 
by degree todegree, yet in essential relation 
(as of winds to waves, the one being always 
the true cause of the other, though they are 
not necessarily of equal force at the same 
time), we shall find vice in its varieties, with 
art-failure,—and virtue in its varicties, with 


The Queen of the Afr. 207 


art-success,—fall and rise together; the 
peasant-girl’s song at her spinning-wheel, 
the peasant laborer’s ‘‘ to the oaks and rills,” 
—domestic music, feebly yet sensitively 
siilful,—music forthe multitude, of benefi- 
cent or of traitorous power, —dancc-melodies, 
pure and orderly, or foul and frantic, —march- 
music, blatant in mere fever of animal pug- 
nacity, or majestic with force of national 
duty and memory,—song-music, reckless, 
sensual, sickly, slovenly, forgetful even of 
the foolish words it effaces with foolish noise, 
—or thoughtful, sacred, healthful, artful, 
forever sanctifying noble thought with sep- 
arately distinguished loveliness of bclong- 
ing sound,—all these families and gradations 
of good or evil, however mingled, follow, 
in so far as they are good, one constant law 
of virtue (or ‘‘ life-strength,” which is the 
literal meaning of the word, and its intended 
one, in wise men’s mouths), and in so far 
as they are evil, are evil by outlawry and 
unvirtue, or death-weakness, Then, passing 
wholly beyond the domain of death, we may 
still imagine the ascendant nobleness of the 
art, through all the concordant life of incor- 
rupt creatures, and a continually deeper 


208 The Queen of the Air. 


harmony of ‘‘ fuissan¢ words and murmurs 
made to bless,” until we reach 


“ The undisturbed song of pure consent, 
Aye sung before the sapphire-colored throne.” 


142. And so far as the sister arts can be 
conceived to have place or office, their 
virtues are subject to a law absolutely the 
same as that of music, only extending its 
anthority intomore various conditions, ow- 
ing to the introduction ofadistinctly repre- 
sentative and historical power, which acts 
under logical as well as mathematical 
restrictions, and is capable of endlessly 
changeful fault, fallacy, and defeat, as well 
as of endlessly manifold victory. 

143. Next to Modesty, and her delight in 
measures, let us reflect a little on the char- 
acter of her adversary, the Goddess of 
dabettys, and herwdelichteimeabsencemor 
measures, or in false ones. It is true that 
there are liberties and liberties. Yonder 
torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with 
its spray leaping into the air like white troops 
of fawns, is free enough. Lost, presently, 
amidst bankless, boundless marsh—soaking 
in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and 


The Queen of the Air. 209 


thither, listless among the poisonous reeds 
and unresisting slime—it is free also. We 
may choose which liberty we like,—the 
restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and 
edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that 
evil liberty which men are now glorifying, 
and proclaiming as essence of gospel to all 
the earth, and will presently, I suppose, 
proclaim also to the stars, with invitation to 
them ouf of their courses,—and of its oppo- 
site continence, which is the clasp and xpveéy 
wepovn of Aglaia’s cestus, we must try to find 
out something true. Forno quality of Art 
has been more powerful in its influence on 
public mind; none is more frequently the 
subject of popular praise, or the end of 
vulgar effort, than what we call ‘‘ Freedom.” 
It is necessary to determine the justice or 
injustice of this popular praise. 

144. I said, a little while ago, that the 
practical teaching of the masters of Art was 
summed by the Oof Giotto. ‘‘ You may 
judge my masterhood of craft,” Giotto tells 
us, ‘‘ by seeing that I can draw a circle 
unerringly.” And we may sately believe 
him, understanding him to mean that, though 
more may be necessary to an artist than 

14 


210 The Queen of the Air, 


such a power, at least sis power is neces 
sary. The qualities of hand and eye needful 
to do this are the first conditions of artistic 
craft. 

145. Try to draw a circle yourself with 
the <“free™ hand and witheamsinclesuns 
You cannot do it if your hand trembles, nor 
if it hesitates, nor if it is unmanageable, nor 
if itis in the common sense of the word 
‘‘ free.” So far from being free, it’ must’ be 
under a control as absolute and accurate 
as if it were fastened to an inflexible bar of 
steel. And yet it must move, under “tiis 
necessary control, with perfect, untormented 
serenity of ease. 

146. That is the condition of all good 
work whatsoever. All freedom is crroz. 
Every line you lay down is either right cr 
wrong; it may be timidly and awkwardly 
wrong, or fearlessly and impudently wrong. 
The aspect of the impudent wrongness is 
pleasurable to vulgar persons, and is what 
they commonly call ‘‘free” execution ; the 
timid, tottering, hesitating wrongness is 
rarely so attractive ; yet, sometimes, if ac- 
companied with good qualities, and right 
aims in other directions, it becames in a 


Che Queen of the Hir. 2IE 


manner charming, like the inarticulateness 
of achild ; but, whatever the charm or man- 
ner of the error, there is but one question 
ultimately to be asked respecting every line 
you draw, Is it right or wrong? If right, it 
most assuredly is nota ‘“‘free” line, butan 
intensely continent, restrained, and consid- 
ered line; and the action of the hand in 
laying it is just as decisive, and just as 
“free,” as the hand of a first-rate surgeon 
in acritical incision. A great operator told 
me that his hand could check itself within 
about the two-hundredth of an inch, in pene- 
trating a membrane; and this, of course, 
without the help of sight, by sensation only. 
With help of sight, and in action on a sub- 
stance which does not quiver nor yield, a 
fine artist’s line is measurable in its proposed 
direction to considerably less than the thou- 
sandth of an inch. 

A wide freedom, truly ! 

147. The conditions of popular art which 
most foster the common ideas about freedom, 
are merely results of irregularly energetic 
effort by men imperfectly educated; these 
conditions being variously mingled with 
cruder mannerisms resulting from timidity, 


212 The Queen of the Air. 


or actual imperfection of body. Northern 
hands and eyes are, of course, never so sub- 
tle as Southern ; and in very cold countries, 
artistic execution is palsied. The effort to 
break through this timidity, or to refine the 
bluntness, may lead to a licentious impetu- 
Osity, oran ostentatious minuteness. Every 
man’s manner has this kind of relation to 
some defect in his physical powers or modes 
of thought; so that in the greatest work 
there is no manner visible. It is at first 
uninteresting from its quietness; the maj- 
esty of restrained power only dawns gradu- 
ally upon us, as we walk towards its 
horizon. 

There is, indeed, often great delightfulness 
in the innocent manners of artists who have 
real power and honesty, and draw in this 
way or that, as best they can, under such ) 
and such untoward circumstances of life. 
But the greater part of the looseness, flimsi- 
ness, or audacity of modern work is the ex- 
pression of an inner spirit of license in mind 
and heart, connected, as I said, with the 
peculiar folly of this age, its hope of, and 
trust in) 2 ‘liberty., Jot which  wemmust 
reason a little in more general terms. 


The Queen of the Air. 212 


148. I believe we can nowhere find a 
better type of a perfectly free creature than 
in the common house-fly. Nor free only, 
but brave; and irreverent to a degree which 
I think no human republican could by any 
philosophy exalt himself to. There is no 
courtesy in him ; he doesnot care whether 
it is king or clown whom he teases; and in 
every step of his swift mechanical march, and 
in every pause of his resolute observation, 
there is one and the same expression of per- 
fect egotism, perfect independence and self- 
confidence, and conviction of the world’s 
having been made for flies. Strike at him 
with your hand, and to him, the mechanical 
fact and external aspect of the matter is, 
what to youit would beif an acre of red 
clay, ten feet thick, toreitself up from the 
ground in one massive field, hovered over 
you in the air for a second, and came crash- 
ing down with an aim, That is the exter- 
nal aspect of it; the inner aspect, to his 
fly’s mind, is of a quite natural and unim- 
portant occurrence—one of the momentary 
conditions of his active life. He steps out 
of the way of your hand, and alights on the 
back of it. You cannot terrify him, not 


214 The Queen of the Air. 


govern him, nor persuade him, nor convince 
him. He has his own positive opinion on 
all matters ; not an unwise one, usually, 
for his own ends; and willask no advice of 
yours. Jie has no work to do—no tyran- 
nical instinct to obey. The earthworm has 
his digging ; the bee her gathering and build- 
ing; the spider her cunning network; the 
ant her treasury and accounts. All these 
are comparatively slaves, or people of vul- 
gar business. But your fly, free in the air, 
free in the chamber—a black incarnation of 
zaprice, wandering, investigating, flitting, 
flirting, feasting at his will, with rich variety 
of choice in feast, from the heaped sweets in 
the grocer’s window to those of the butcher’s 
back-yard, and from the galled place on 
your cab-horse’s back, to the brown spot 
in the road, from which, as the hoof disturbs 
him, he rises with angry republican buzz— 
what freedom is like his ? ; 
149. For captivity, again, perhaps your 
poor watch-dog is as sorrowful a typeas you 
will easily find. Mine certainly is. The 
day is lovely, but I must write this, and 
cannot go out with him. He is chained in 
the yard decause Ido notlike dogs in rooms, 


The Queen of the Air, 218 


and the gardener does not like dogs in gar- 
dens. He has no books,—nothing but his 
own weary thoughts for company, and a 
group of those free flies, whom he snaps at, 
with sullen ill success. Such dim hope as 
he may have that I may take him out with 
me, will be, hour by hour, wearily disap- 
pointed ; or, worse, darkened at once intoa 
leaden despair by an authoritative ‘‘No”— 
too well understood. Mis fidelity only seals 
his fate; if he would not watch for me, he 
would be sent away, and go hunting with 
some happier master: but he watches, and 
is wise, and faithful, and miserable; and 
his high animal intellect only gives him 
the wistful powers of wonder, and sorrow, 
and desire, and affection, which embitter his 
captivity. Yet of the two, would we rather 
be watch-dog or fly? 

150. Indeed, the first point we have all to 
determine is not how free we are, but what 
kind of creatures we are. It is of small im- 
portance to any of us whether we get liberty ; 
but of the greatest that we deserve it. 
Whether wecan winit, fate must determine 
but that we will be worthy of it we may our- 
selves determine ; and the sorrowfullest fate 


216 The Queen of the Air. 


of all that we can suffer is to have it wthou$ 
- deserving it. 

151. [have hardly patience to hold my 
pen and go on writing, as I remember (I 
would that it were possible for a few con- 
secutive instants to forget) the infinite fol- 
lies of modern thought in this matter, cen- 
tred in the notion that liberty is good fora 
man, irrespectively of the use he is likely to 
make of it. Folly unfathomable! unspeak- 
able ! unendurable to look in the full face 
of, as the laugh of a cretin. You will send 
your child, will you, into a room where the 
table is loaded with sweet wine and fruit— 
some poisoned, some not ?—you will say to 
him, << Choosejircely, my <little child (eitiis 
so good for you to have freedom of choice; 
it forms your character—your individuality ! 
If you take the wrong cup or the wrong berry, 
you will die before the day is over, but you 
will have acquired the dignity of a Free 
child?” 

152. You think that puts the case too 
sharply? I tell you, lover of liberty, there is 
no choice offered to you, but it is similarly 
between life and death. There is no act, 
nor option of act, possible, but the wrong 


The Queen of the Air, 217 


deed or option has poison in it which will 
stay in your veins thereafter forever. Never 
more to all eternity can you be as you might 
have been had you not done that—chosen 
ide Ournave ‘formed your character,” 
forsooth! No; if you have chosen ill, you 
have De-formed it, and that for ever! In 
some choices it had been better for you that 
a red-hot iron bar struck you aside, scarred 
and helpless, than that you had so chosen. 
‘You will know better next time!” No. 
Next time willnever come. Next time the 
choice will be in quite another aspect—be- 
tween quite different things,—you, weaker 
than you were by theevil into which you 
have fallen; it, more doubtful than it was, 
by the increased dimness of your sight. No 
one ever gets wiser by doing wrong, nor 
stronger. You will get wiser and stronger 
only by doing right, whether forced or not; 
the prime, the one need is to do /ha/, under 
whatever compulsion, until you can do it 
without compulsion. And then you are a 
Man. 

153. “What!” a wayward youth might 
perhaps answer, incredulously, ‘‘no one 
ever gets wiser by doing wrong? Shalll 


218 The Queen of the Fiz. 


not know the world best by trying the wrong 
of it, and repenting? [lave I not, even as it 
is, learned much by many of my errors?” In- 
deed, the effort by which partially you recov- 
ered yourself was precious ; that part of your 
thought by which you discerned the error 
was precious. What wisdom and strength 
you kept, and rightly used, are rewarded ; 
and in the pain and therepentance, and in the 
acquaintance with the aspects of folly and 
sin, youhave learned something ; howmuch 
less than you would have learned in right 
paths can never be told, but that it zs less is 
certain. Your liberty cf choice has simply 
destroyed for you so much life and strength 
never regainable. It is true, you now know 
the habits of swine, and the taste of husks; do 
you think your father could not have taught 
you to know better habits and pleasanter 
tastes, if you had stayed in his house; and 
that the knowledge you have lost would 
not have been more, as well as sweeter, 
than that you have gained? But ‘‘it so 
forms my individuality to be free!” Your 
individuality was given you by God, and in 
your race, and if you have any to speak of, 
you will want no liberty. You will want a 


The Queen of the Hir. 219 


den to work in, and peace, and lizht—no 
more,—in absolute need ; if more, in any- 
wise, it willstill not be liberty, but direction, 
instruction, reproof, and sympathy. But if 
you have no individuality, if there is no true 
character nor true desire in you, then you 
will indeed want to be free. You will begin 
early, and, as a boy, desire to be a man; 
and, as a man, think yourself as good as 
every other. You will choose freely to eat, 
freely to drink, freely to stagger and fall, 
freely, at last, to curse yourself and die. 
Death is the only real freedom possible to us ; 
and that is consummate freedom, permission 
for every particle in the rotting body to 
leave its neighbor particle, and shift for itself. 
You call it ‘‘corruption” in the flesh; but 
before it comes to that, all liberty is an equal 
corruption in mind. You ask for freedom of 
thought; but if you have not sufficient 
grounds for thought, you have no _ busi- 
ness to think; and if you have sufficient 
grounds, you have no business to think 
wrong. Only one thought is possible to you 
if you are wise—your liberty is geometrically 
proportionate to your folly. 

154. ‘‘But all this glory and activity of 


220 The Queen of the Air. 


our age; what are they owing to, but to our 
freedom of thought?” Ina measure, they 
are owing—what good is in them—to the 
discovery of many lies, and the escape from 
the power of evil. Not to liberty, but to the 
deliverance from evil or cruel masters. 
Brave men have dared to examine lies which 
had long been taught, not because they were 
free-thinkers, but because they were such 
stern and close thinkers that the lie couldno 
longer escape them. Of course the restric- 
tion of thought, or of its expression, by per- 
secution, is merely a form of violence, justi- 
fiable or not, as other violence is, according 
to the character of the persons against whom 
it is exercised, and the divine and eternal 
laws which it vindicates or violates. We 
must not burn a man alive for saying that 
the Athanasian creed is ungrammatical, nor 
stop abishop’s salary because weare getting 
the worst of an argument withhim; neither . 
must we let drunken men how! in the public 
streets at night. There is much that is true 
in the part of Mr. Mill’s essay on Liberty 
which treats of freedom of thought ; some 
important truths are there beautifully ex- 
pressed, but many, quite vital, are omitted ; 


The Queen cf the Air, 228 


and the balance, therefore, is wrongly struck, 
The liberty of expression, with a great 
nation, would become like that in a well- 
educated company, in which there is indeed 
freedom of speech, but not of clamor; or 
like that in an orderly senate, in which men 
who deserve to be heard, are heard in due 
time, and under determined restrictions. 
The degree of liberty you can rightly grant 
to anumber of mcn is in the inverse ratio 
of their desire for it ; and a general hush, or 
call to order, would be often very desirable 
in this England ofours. Tortherest, ofany 
any good or evil extent, it is impossible to 
say what measure is owing to restraint, and 
what to license where the right is balanced 
between them. I was not a little provoked 
one day, a summer or two sSince,in Scot- 
land, because the Duke of Athol hindered 
me from examining the gneiss and slate 
junctions in Glen Tilt, at the hour conven- 
ient to me; but I saw them at last, and in 
quietness; and to the very restriction that 
annoyed me, owed, probably, the fact of 
their being in existence, instead of being 
blastedaway by a mob-company ; while the 
“free ” paths and inlets of Loch Katrine and 


222 ‘The Queen of the Afr. 


the Lake of Geneva are forever trampled 
down and destroyed, not by one duke, 
but by tens of thonsands of ignorant ty- 
rants. 

155. So,a Dean and Chapter may, per- 
haps, unjustifiably charge me twopence for 
seeing a cathedral ; but your free mob pulls 
spire and all down about my ears, and I 
can see it no more forever. And even if I 
cannot get up to the granite junctions in the 
glen, the stream comes down from them 
pure to the Garry; but in Beddington Park 
I am stopped by the newly-erected fence of 
a buildine speculator; and the bright 
Wandel, divine of waters as Castaly, is 
filled by the free public with old shoes, 
obscene crockery, and ashes. 

156. In fine, the arruments for liberty 
may in general be summed in a few very 
simple forms, as follows: 

Misguiding is mischievous: therefore 
guiding is. 

If the blind lead the blind, both fall into 
the ditch: therefore, nobody should lead 
anybody. 

‘Lambs and fawns should be left free in 
the ficlds; much more bearsand wolves. , 


The Queen of the Air. 223 


lfa man’s gun and shot are his own, he 
may fire in any direction he pleases. 

A fence across a road is inconvenient; 
much more one at the side of it. 

Babes should not be swaddled with their 
hands bound down to their sides: therefore 
they should be thrown out to roll in the 
kennels naked. 

None of these arguments are good, and 
the practical issues of them are worse. For 
there are certain eternal laws for human 
conduct which are quite clearly discernible 
Dy shumietereason. 0 far as these -are 
escovercd Sand obeyed,» by ~ whatever 
machinery or authority the obedience is 
procured, there follow life and strength. So 
far as they are disobeyed, by whatever good 
intention the disobedience is brought about, 
there follow ruin and sorrow. And _ the 
first duty of every man in the world is to 
find his true master, and, for his own good, 
submit to him ; and to find his true inferior, 
and, for that inferior’s good, conquer him. 
The punishment is sure, if we either refuse 
the reverence, or are too cowardly and indo- 
lent to enforce the compulsion. A base 
nation crucifies or poisons its wise men, 


224 The Queen of the Air. 


and lets its fools rave and rot in its streets. 
A wise nation obeys the one, restrains the 
other, and cherishes all. 

157, The best examples of the results of 
wise normal discipline in Art will be found 
in whatever evidence remains respecting 
the lives of great Italian painters, though, 
unhappily, in eras of progress, but just in 
proportion to the admirableness and effi- 
ciency of the life, will be usually the scanti- 
ness of its history. The individualitics and 
liberties which are causes of destruction 
may be recorded; but the loyal conditions 
of daily breath are never told. Because 
Leonardo made models of machines, dug 
canals, built fortifications, and dissipated 
half his art-power in capricious ingenuities, 
we have many anecdotes of him ;—but no 
picture of importance on canvas, and onlya 
few withered stains of oneupona wall. But 
because his pupil, or reputed pupil, Luini, 
labored in constant and successfulsimplicity, 
wc haveno anecdotes of him;—only hundreds 
of noble works. Luini is, perhaps, the best 
central type of the highly-trained Italian 
painter. He is the only man who entirely 
united the religious temper which was the 


Tbe Queen of the Air. 225 


spirit-life ofart, with the physical power which 
was its bodily life. He joins the purity and 
passion of Angelico to the strength of Vero- 
nese: the two elements, poised in perfect 
balance, areso calmed and restrained, each 
by the other, that most of us lose the sense of 
both. The artist does not see the strength, 
by reason of the chastened spirit in which 
it is used: and the religious visionary does 
not recognize the passion, by reason of the 
frank human truth with which it is rendered. 
He is aman ten times greater than Leo- 
nardo ;--a mighty colorist, while Leonardo 
was only a fine draughtsman in_ black, 
staining the chiaroscuro drawing, like a 
colored print : he perceived and rendered the 
delicatest types of human beauty that have 
been painted since the days of the Greeks, 
while Leonardo depraved his finer instincts 
by caricature, and remained to the end of his 
days the slave of an archaic smile: and 
he is a designer as frank, instinctive, and 
exhaustless as Tintoret, while Leonardo’s 
design is only an agony of science, admired 
chiefly because it is painful, and capable of 
analysis in its best accomplishment. Luini 
has left nothing behind him that is not 


226 The Queen of the Air. 


lovely ; but of his life I believe hardly any- 
thing is known beyond remnants of tradition 
which murmur about Lugano and Saronno, 
and which remain ungleaned. This only is 
certain, that he was born in the loveliest 
district of North Italy, where hills, and 
streams, and air meet in softest harmonies. 
Child-ofi the A lpsywand = ofstheil sdivinest 
lake, he is taught, without doubt or dis- 
may, a lofty religious creed, and a suffi- 
cient law “of life, and of its mechanical! 
arts. Whether lessoned by Leonardo him- 
self, or merely one of many disciplined 
in the system of the Milanese school, he 
learns unertringly to draw, unerringly 
and enduringly to paint. His tasks are 
set him without question day by day, by 
men who are justly satisfied with his 
work, and who accept it without any 
harmful praise, or senseless blame. Place, 
scale, and subject are determined for him on 
the cloister wall or the church dome; as he 
is required, and for sufficient daily bread, 
and little more, he paints what he has been 
taught to design wisely, and has passion to 
realize gloriously: every touch he lays is 
eternal, every thought he conceives is beauti- 


The Queen of the Air. 227 


ful and pure: his hand moves always in 
radiance of blessing; from day to day his 
life enlarges in power and peace; it passes 
away cloudlessly, the starry twilight remain- 
ing arched far against the night. 

158. Oppose to such a life as this that ofa 
great painter amidst the elements of modern 
English liberty. Take the life of Turner, in 
whom the artistic energy and inherent love 
of beauty were atleast as strong as in Luini: 
but, amidst the disorder and ghastliness of 
the lower streets of London, his instincts in 
early infancy were warped into toleration of 
evil, or even into delight init. He gathers 
what he can of instruction by questioning 
and prying among half-informed masters ; 
spells out some knowledge of classical fable ; 
educates himself, by an admirable force, to 
the production of wildly majestic or patheti- 
cally tender and pure pictures, by which he 
cannot live. Thereis no one tojudge them, 
or to command him : only some of the Eng- 
lish upper classes hire him to paint their 
houses and parks, and destroy the drawings 
afterwards by the most wanton neglect. 
Tired of laboring carefully, without either 
reward or praise, he dashes out into various 


g2f Che Queen of the Hir. 


experimental and popular works—makes 
himself the servant of the lower public, and 
is dragged hither and thither at their will ; 
while yet, helpless and guideless, he indulges 
his idiosyncrasies till they change into insan- 
ities; the strength of his soul increasing its 
sufferings, and giving force to its errors ; all 
the purpose of life degenerating into instinct ; 
and the web of his work wrought, at last, of 
beauties too subtle to be understood, his 
liberty, with vices too singular to be for- 
given—all useless, because magnificent 
idiosyncrasy had become solitude, or con- 
tention, in the midst of a reckless populace, 
instead of submitting itself in loyal harmony 
to the Art-laws of an understanding nation. 
And the life passed away in darkness ; and 
its final work, in all the best beauty of it, has 
already perished, only enough remaining to 
teach us what we have lost. 

159. These are the opposite effects of 
Law and of Liberty on men of the highest 
powers. In thecase of inferiors the contrast 
is still more fatal: under strict law, they 
become the subordinate workers in great 
schools, healthily aiding, echoing, or sup- 
plying, with multitudinous force of hand, 


The Queen of the Hir. 229 


the mind of the leading masters: they are 
the nameless carvers of great architecture— 
stainers of glass—hammerers of iron—help- 
ful scholars, whose work ranks round, if not 
with, their master’s, and never disgraces it. 
But the inferiors under a system of license 
for the most part perish in miserable effort ; * 


* As I correct this sheet for press, my “Pall Mall 
Gazette ” of last Saturday, April 17, is lyingon the table 
by me. I print a few lines out of it: 

“ An ARTIST’S DEATH.—A sad story was told at an 
inquest held in St. Pancras last night by Dr. Lankester 
on the body of . . ., aged fifty-nine, a French artist 
who was found dead in his bed at his roomsin... 
Street. M.... , also an artist, said he had known 
the deceased for fifteen years. He once helda high 
position, and being anxious to make a name in the 
world, he five years ago commenced a large picture, 
which he hoped, when completed, to have in the gallery 
at Versailles ; and with that view he sent a photograph 
of it to the French Emperor. He also had an idea of 
sending it to the English Royal Academy. He labored 
on this picture, neglecting other work which would have 
paid him well, and gradually sank lower and lower into 
poverty. His friends assisted him, but being absorbed 
in his great work, he did not heed their advice, and 
they left him. He was, however, assisted by the French 
Ambassador, and last Saturday, he (the witness) saw 
deceased, who was much depressed in spirits, as he ex- 
pected the brokers to be put in possession for rent. 


230 The Queen of the Afr. 


afew struggle into pernicious eminence— 
harmful alike to themselves and to all who 
admire them; many die of Starvation ; 
many insane, either in weakness of insolent 
egotism, like Haydon, or in a conscientious 
agony of beautiful purpose and warped 
power, like Blake. There is no probability 
of the persistence of a licentious school in 
any good accidentally discovered by them ; 
there is an approximate certainty of their 
gathering, with acclaim, round any shadow 
of evil, and following 7#to whatever quarter 
of destruction it may lead. 

160. Thus far the notes on Freedom. 
Now, lastly, here is some talk which I tried 


He said his troubles were so great that he feared his 
brain would give way. The witness gave him a shilling 
for which he appeared very thankful. On Monday the 
witness called upon him, but received no answer to his 
knock. He went again on Tuesday, and entered the 
deceased’s bedroom and found him dead. Dr. George _ 
Ross said that when called in to the deceased he had 
been dead at least two days, The room was in a filthy, 
dirty condition, and the picture referred to—certainly a 
very fine one—was in thatroom. The post-mortem 
examination showed that the cause of death was fatty 
degeneration of the heart, the latter probably having 
cease its action through the mental excitement of the 
deceased.’’ 


The Queen of the Air. 225 


at the time to make intelligible ; and with 
which I close this volume, because it will 
serve sufficiently to express the practical 
relation in which I think the art and imag- 
ination of theGreeks stand to our own ; and 
will show the reader that my view of that 
relation is unchanged, from the first day on 
which I began to write, until now. 





THE HERCULES OF CAMARINA. 


ADDRESS \TO THE STUDENTS OF THE ART SCHOOL 
OF SOUTH LAMBERT, MARCH 15, 1869. 


161. Among the photographs of Greek 
coins which present so many admirable 
subjects for your study, I must speak for the 
present of one only : the Hercules of Cama- 
Tina. You have, represented by a Greek 
workman, in that coin, the face of a man 
and the skin of a lion’s head. And the 
man’s face is like aman’s face, but the lion’s 
skin is not like a lion’s skin. 

162. Now there are some people who will 
tell you that Greek art is fine, because it is 
true; and because it carves men’s faces as 
like men’s as it can. 


232 The Queen of the Air. 


And there are other people who will tell 
you that Greek art is fine, because it is not 
true; and carves a lion’s skin so as to look 
not at all like a lion’s skin. 

And you fancy that one or other of these 
sets of people must be wrong, and are per- 
haps much puzzled to find out which you 
should believe. 

But neither of them are wrong, and you 
will have eventually to believe, or rather 
to understand and know, in reconciliation, 
the truths taught by each; but for the pres- 
ent, the teachers of the first group are those 
you must follow. 

It is they who tell you the deepest and 
usefullest truth, which involves all others 
in time. Greek art, and all other art, is fine 
when it makes a man’s face as hkea man’s 
face as it can. Holdto that. All kinds of 
nonsense are talked to you, nowadays, 
ingeniously and irrelevantly about art. 
Therefore, for the most part of the day, shut 
your ears, and keep your eyes open: and 
understand primarily, what you may, I 
fancy, understand easily, that the greatest 
masters of all greatest schools—Phidias, 
Donatello, Titian, Velasquez, or Sir Joshua 


The Queen of the Air. 233 


Reynolds—all tried to make human creatures 
as like human creatures as they could; and 
that anything less like humanity than their 
work, is not so good as theirs. 

Get that well driven into your heads ; and 
don’t let it out again, at your peril. 

163. Having got it well in, you may then 
further understand, safely, that there is a 
great deal of sccondary work in pots, and 
pans, and floors, and carpets, and shawls, 
and architectural ornament, which ought 
essentially, to be uwnlke reality, and to de- 
pend for its charm on quite other qualities 
than imitative ones. But all such art is 
inferior and secondary—much of it more or 
less instinctive and animal, and a civilized 
human creature can only learn its principles 
rightly, by knowing those of great civilized 
art. first—which is always the represen- 
tation, to the utmost of its power, of what- 
ever it has got to show—made to look 
as like the thing as possible. Go into the 
National Gallery, and look at the foot of Cor- 
reggio’s Venus there. Correggio made it 
as like a foot as he could, and you won't 
easily find anything liker. Now, you will 
find on any Greek vase something meant for 


234 The Queen of the Air. 


a foot, or a hand, which is not at all like 
one. The Greek vase is a good thing in its 
way, but Correggio’s picture is the best 
work. 

164. So, again, go into the Turner room 
of the National Gallery, and look at Turner’s 
drawing of ‘‘Ivy Bridge.” You will find 
the water in it is like real water, and the 
ducks in it are like real ducks. Then go 
into the British Museum, and look for an 
Egyptian landscape, and you will find the 
water in that constituted of blue zigzags, 
not at all like water; and ducks in the mid- 
dle of it made of red lines, looking not in 
the least as if they could stand stuffing with 
sage and onions.‘ They are very good in 
their way, but Turner’s are better. 

165. I will not pause to fence my general 
principle against what you perfectly well 
know of the due contradiction, that a thing 
may be painted very like, yet painted ill. 
Rest content with knowing that it musfbe ~ 
like, if it is painted well; and take this 
further general law : Imitation is like charity. 
When it is done for love it is lovely ; when 
it is done for show, hateful. 

166. Well, then, this Greek coin is fine, 


Tbe Queen of the Air. 235 


first because the face is like a face. Per- 
haps you think there is something par- 
ticularly handsome in the face, which you 
can't see in the photograph, or can’t at pres- 
ent appreciate. But there is nothing of the 
kind. It is a very regular, quiet, common- 
place sort of face ; and any average English 
gentleman’s, of good descent, would be far 
handsomer. 

167. Fix that in your heads also, there- 
fore, that Greek faces are not particularly 
beautiful. Of the much nonsense against 
which you are to keep your ears shut, that 
which is talked to you of the Greek ideal of 
beauty is among the absolutest. There is 
not a single instance of a very beautiful 
head left by the highest school of Greek art. 
On coins, there is even no approximately 
beautiful one. The Juno of Argos is a 
virago; the Athena of Athens grotesque, 
the: Athena of Corinth is insipid; and of 
Thurium, sensual. The Siren Ligeia, and 
fountain of Arethusa, on the coins of Terina 
and Syracuse, are prettier, but totally with- 
out expression, and chiefly set off by their 
well-curled hair. You might have expected 
something subtle in Mercuries; but the 


236 The Queen of the Aft. 


Mercury of nus is a very stupid-looking 
fellow, in a cap like a bowl, witha knob on 
the top of it. The Bacchus of Thasos is a 
drayman with his hair pomatum’d. ‘The 
Jupiter of Syracuse is, however, calm and 
refined ; and the Apollo of Clazomenz would 
have been impressive, ifhe had not come 
down to us, much flattened by friction. But 
on the whole, the merit of Greek coins does 
not primarily depend on beauty of features, 
nor even, in the period of highest art, that 
of the statues. You may take the Venus of 
Melos as a standard of beauty of the central 
Greek type. She has tranquil, regular, and 
lofty features; but could not hold her own 
for a moment against the beauty of a simple 
English girl, of pure race and kind heart. 
168. And the reason that Greek art, on the 
whole, bores you (and you know it does), 
is that you are always forced to look in it 
for something that is not there; but which 
may. bevseen every day-siniied aiiieman 
round you; and which you are naturally 
disposed to delight in, and ought to delight 
in. For the Greek race was not at all one 
of exalted beauty, but only of general and 
healthy completeness of form. ‘They were 


The Queen of the Air. 237 


only, and could be only, beautiful in body 
to the degree that they were beautiful in soul 
(for you will find, when you read deeply 
into the matter, that the body is only the 
soul made visible). And the Greeks were 
indeed very good people, much better people 
than most of us think, or than many of us 
are; but there are better people alive now 
than the best of them, and lovelier people 
to be seen now than the loveliest of them. 
169. Then what ere the merits of this 
Greek art, which make it so exemplary for 
you? Well, not that itis beautiful, but that 
it is Right.* All that it desires to do, it 
does, and all that it does, does well. You 
will find, as you advance in the knowledge 
of art, that its laws of self-restraint are very 
marvellous ; that its peace of heart, and con- 
tentment in doing a simple thing, with only 
one or two qualities, restrictedly desired, 
and. sufficiently attained, are a most whole- 
some element of education for you, as 
opposed to the wild writhing, and wrestling, 
and longing for the moon, and tilting at 
windmilis, and agony of eyes, and torturing 
of fingers, and general spinning out of one’s 


* Compare above, § Io1. 


238 The Queen of the Aix. 


soul into fiddle-strings, which constitute 
the ideal life of a modern artist. 

Also observe, there is entire masterhood 
of its business up to the required point. <A 
Greek does not reach aftcr other people’s 
strength, nor outreach his own. He never 
tries to paint before he can draw ; he never 
tries to lay on flesh where there are no 
bones; and he never expects to find the 
bones of anything in his inner consciousness. 
Those are his first merits—sincere and inno- 
cent purpose, strong common-sense and 
principle, and all the strength that comes of 
these, and all the grace that follows on that 
strength. 

170, But, secondly, Greek art is always 
exemplary in disposition of masses, which 
is a thing that in modern days students 
rarely look for, artists not enough, and the 
public never. But, whatever else Greek 
work may fail of, you may be always sure _ 
its masses are well placed, and their placing 
has been the object of the most subtle care. 
Look, for instance, at the inscription in front 
of this Hercules of the name of the town— 
Camarina. You can’t read it, even though 
you may know Greek, without some pains ; 


The Queen of the Air. 239 


for the sculptor knew well enough that it 
mattered very little whether you read it or 
not, for the Camarina Hercules could tell his 
own story ; but what did above. all things 
matter was, that no K or A or M should 
come in a wrong place with respect to: the 
outline of the head, and divert the eye from 
it, or spoil any of its lines. So the whole 
inscription is thrown into a sweeping curve 
of gradually diminishing size, continuing 
from the lion’s paws, round the neck, up to 
the forehead, and answering a decorative 
purpose as completely as the curls of the 
mane opposite. Ofthese, again, you cannot 
change or displace one without mischief; 
they are almost as even in reticulation asa 
piece of basket-work ; but each has a differ- 
ent form and a due relation to the rest, and 
if you set to work to draw that mane rightly, 
you will find that, whatever time you give 
to it, you can’t get the tresses quite into 
their places, and that every tress out of its 
place does an injury. If you want to test 
your powers of accurate drawing, you may 
make that lion’s mane your fons asinorum, 
I have never yet met with a student who 
didn’t malze an ass in a lion’s skin of himself 
when he tried it. } 


240 The Queen of the Air. 


171. Granted, however, that these tresses 
may be finely placed, still they are not like 
a lion’s mane. So we come back to the 
question,—if the face is to be like a man’s 
face, why is not the lion’s mane to be like 
a lion’s mane? Well, because it can’t be 
like a lion’s mane without too much trouble, 
—and inconvenience after that, and poor 
success, after all. Too much trouble, in 
cutting the die into fine fringes and jags; 
inconvenience after that,—because fringes 
and jags would spoil the surface of a coin ; 
poor success aftcr all,—because, though 
you can easily stamp cheeks and foreheads 
smooth at a blow, you can’t stamp project- 
ing tresses fine ata blow, whatever pains 
you take with your die. 

So your Greek uses his common sense, 
wastes no time, uses no skill, and says to 
you, “‘Here are. beautifully set tresses, 
which I have carefully designed and easily 
stamped. Enjoy them, and if you cannot 
understand that they mean lion’s mane, 
heaven mend your wits.” 

172, See, then, you have in this work 
well-founded knowledge, simple and right 
aims, thorough mastery of handicraft, splen- 


Ube Queen of the Hir. 24 


did invention in arrangement, unerring com+ 
mon sense in treatment,—merits, these, I 
think, exemplary enough to justify our tor 
menting you a little with Greek art. But it 
has one merit more than these, the greatest 
ofall. It always means something worth 
saying. Not merely worth saying for that 
time only, but for all time. What do you 
think this helmct cf lion’s hide is always 
given to Hercules for? You can’t suppose 
it means only that he once killed a lion, and 
always carried its skin afterwards to show 
that he had, as Indian sportsmen sent home 
stuffed ruvs, with claws at the corners, and 
a lump in the middle which one tumbles 
over every time one stirs the fire. What 
was this Nemean Lion, whose spoils were 
evermore to cover Hercules from the cold? 
Not merely a large specimen of Felis Leo, 
ranging the fields of Nemea, be sure of that. 
This Nemean cub was one ofa bad litter. 
Born of Typhon and Echidna,—of the whirl- 
wind and the snake,—Cerberus his brother, 
the Hydra of Lerna his sister,—it must have 
been difficult to get his hide off him. He 
had to be found in darkness, too, and dealt 


upon aS weapons, by grip at the throat 
I 


242 The Queen of the Air. 


—arrows and club of no avail against him, 
What does all that mean? 

173. It means that the Nemean Lion is 
the first great adversary of: life, whatever 
that may be—to Hercules, or to any of us, 
ther ornow. ‘The first monster we have to 
strangle, or be destroyed by, fighting in the 
dark, and with none to help us, only Athena 
standing by to encourage with her smile. 
Every man’s Nemean Lion lics in wait for 
him somewhere. The slothful man says, 
There is a lion in the path. He says well. 
The quiet zzslothful man says the same, and 
knows it too. But they differ in their further 
reading of the text. The slothful man says, 
I shall be slain, and the unslothful, Ir shall 
be, itis the firstsugly sand ysitrone cenemy. 
that rises against us, all future victory de- 
pending on victory over that. Kill it; and 
through all the rest of life, what was once 
dreadful is your armor, and you are clothed - 
with that conquest for every other, and 
helmed with its crest of fortitude for evermore. 

Alas, we have most of us to walk bare- 
headed ; but that is the meaning of the story 
of Nemea,—worth laying to heart and think- 
ing of sometimes, when you see a dish gar- 


The Queen of the Air. 243 


nished with parsley, which was the crown 
at the Nemean games, 

174. How far, then, have we got in our 
list of the merits of Greek art now? 

Sound knowledge. 

Simple aims. 

Mastered craft. 

Vivid invention. 

Strong common sense. 

And eternally true and wise meaning. 

Are these notenough? MHereis onemore, 
then, which will find favor, I should think, 
with the British Lion. Greek art is never 
frightened at anything ; it is always cool. 

175. It differs essentially from all other 
art, past or present, in this incapability of 
being frightened. Half the power and im- 
agination of every other school depend on 
a certain feverish terror mingling with their 
sense of beauty,—the feeling that a child 
has in a dark room, or a sick person in see- 
ing ugly dreams. But the Greeks never 
have ugly dreams, They cannot draw any- 
thing ugly when they try. Sometimes they 
put themselves to their wits’--end to draw 
an ugly thing,—the Medusa’s head, for in- 
stance,—but they can’t do it, not they, be- 


244 The Queen of the Hir. 


cause nothing frightens them. They widen 
the mouth, and grind the teeth, and puffthe 
cheeks, and set the eyes a goggling ; and 
the thing is only ridiculous after all, not the 
least dreadful, for there is no dread in their 
hearts. Pensiveness; amazement; often 
deepest grief and desolateness. All these ; 
but terror never. Everlasting calm in the 
presence of all fate; and joy such as they 
could win, not indeed in a perfect beauty, 
but in beauty at perfect rest! A kind of art 
this, surely, to be looked at, and thought 
upon sometimcs with profit, even in these 
latter days. 

176. To be looked ct sometimes. Not 
continually, and never as a model for imi- 
tation. For you are not Greeks; but, for 
better or worse, English creatures ; and can- 
not do, even if it were a thousand times bet- 
ter worth doing, anything well, except what 
your English hearts shall prompt, and your 
English skies teach you. For all good art 
is the natural utterance of its own people in 
its own day. 

But also, your own art is a better and 
brighter one than ever this Greek art was. 
Many motives, powers, and insights have 


Ube Queen of the Air. 245 


been added to those elder ones. The very 
corruptions into which we have fallen are 
signs of a subtle life, higher than theirs was, 
and therefore more fearful in its faults and 
death. Christianity has neither superseded, 
nor, by itself, excelled heathenism; but it 
has added its own good, won also by many 
a Nemean contest in dark valleys, to all that 
was good and noble in heaticnism; and 
our present thoughts and work, when they 
are right, are nobler than the heathen’s. 
And we are not reverent enough to them, 
because we possess too much of them. 
That sketch of four cherub heads from an 
English girl, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, at 
Kensington, is an incomparably finer thing 
than ever the Greeks did. Ineffably tender 
in the touch, yet Ilerculean in power s¢ in- 
nocent, yet exalted in feeling ; purein color 
as a pearl ; reserved and decisive in design, 
as this Lion crest, —if 74 alone existed of such, 
—if it were a picture by Zeuxis, the only one 
left in the world, and you build a shrine for 
it, and were allowed to see it only seven 
days ina year, it alone would teach you all 
of art that you ever needed to know. But 
you do not learn from this or any othersuch 


246 The Queen of the Air. 


work, because you havenotreverenceenough 
for them, and are trying to learn from all at 
once, and from a hundred other masters be- 
sides. 

177. Here, then, is the practical advice 
which I would venture to deduce from what 
I have tried to show you. Use Greek art as 
a first, nota final, teacher. Learn to draw 
carefully from Greek work; above all, to 
place forms correctly, and to use light and 
shade tenderly. Never allow yourselves 
black shadows. Itis easy to make things 
look round and projecting ; but the things to 
exercise yourselves in are the placing of the 
masses, and the modelling of the lights. It 
is an admirable exercise to take a pale wash 
of color for all the shadows, never rcinforc- 
ing it everywhere, but drawing the statue as 
if it werein far distance, making all the darks 
one flat pale tint. ‘Then model from those 
into the lights, rounding as wellas you can, | 
on those subtle conditions. In your chalk 
drawings, separate the lights from the darks 
at once all over; then reinforce the darks 
slightly where absolutely necessary, and put - 
your whole strength on the lights and their 
limits. Then, when you have learned te 


The Queen of the Air, 247 


draw thoroughly, take one master for your 
painting, as you would have done necessa- 
rily in old times by being put into his school 
(were I to choose for you, it should be 
among six men only—Titian, Correggio, 
Paul Veronese, Velasquez, Reynolds, or 
Holbein). If you are a landscapist, Turner 
must be your only guide (for no other great 
landscape painter has yet lived); and hay- 
ing chosen, do your best to understand your 
own chosen master, and obey zm, and no 
one else, till you have strength to deal with 
the nature itself round you, and then, be 
your own master, and see with your own 
eyes. If you have got masterhood or sight 
in you, that is the way to make the most of 
them ; and if you have neither, you will at 
least be sound in your work, prevented from 
immodest and useless effort, and protected 
from vulgar and fantastic error. 

And so I wish you all, good speed, and 
the favor of Hercules and of the Muses ; and 
to those who shall best deserve them, the 
crown of Parsley first and then of the 
Laurel. 


THE END. 





e 


tales 











4nd 
ALVA 


“Lad 


“AIVIQI] IY} 0} WI Bulsuliq Aq pamoual 
oq ABUI }I ploy UO jou J] ,"oNq 3eq,, Jopun podwieys aiep ise] 
943 U0 AUVUEIT NOSTIM “YX SINOT 24} 38 onp si Yoo sty] 








Hi 


Soe rea ae list 





